Introduction of LaTeX

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX is a document preparation system. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document and to add citations and cross-references.

This typesetting system is widely used in academia for the communication and publication of scientific documents in many fields, including mathematics, statistics, computer science, engineering, chemistry, physics, economics, linguistics, quantitative psychology, philosophy, and political science. It also has a prominent role in the preparation and publication of books and articles that contain complex multilingual materials, such as Sanskrit and Greek. LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language.

LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level, descriptive markup language that accesses the power of TeX in an easier way for writers. In essence, TeX handles the layout side, while LaTeX handles the content side for document processing. LaTeX comprises a collection of TeX macros and a program to process LaTeX documents, and because the plain TeX formatting commands are elementary, it provides authors with ready-made commands for formatting and layout requirements such as chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and bibliographies.

- Wikipedia

Why LaTeX?

1. LaTeX provides very high quality and is extremely customizable.
2. It’s extremely stable, no matter how complex the documents are.
3. It’s free and Open Source, we can study and improve everything as we do on this site.
4. LaTeX is portable concerning its implementation, your document source and its output (all is cross-platform).
5. It provides a logical approach to create documents instead of a physical, enhancing consistency.
6. Your document is safe because the file format is open and there’s no virus threat.
   

    But you shouldn’t use LaTeX if
        * You don’t have time to learn it.
        * Your document is already written.
        * What you care about is the design of the document.

Getting Started with LaTeX

The following link provides the guide for editting the documents by LaTeX.

• Quick Start Guide