a Essential L TEX

Computing Service Logo U05.04202 October 1993 Jon Warbrick

Introduction

This document is an attempt to give you all the essential information that you will need in order a to use the L TEX Document Preparation System. Only very basic features are covered, and a vast amount of detail has been omitted. In a document of this size it is not possible to include everything that you might need to know, and if you intend to make extensive use of the program you should refer to a more complete reference. Attempting to produce complex documents using only the information found below will require much more work than it should, and will probably produce a less than satisfactory result. a a The main reference for L TEX is The L TEX Users guide and Reference Manual by Leslie Lamport (M05.04200). This contains all the information that you will ever need to know about the program, a and you will need access to a copy if you are to use L TEX seriously. Both the Manual and this document avoid mentioning anything that depends on the particular a computer system that you are using. This is because L TEX is available on a number of systems and they all dier in one way or another. Instead, they both refer to a local guide for their particular a a system. For L TEX on the Prime, the local guide is the handout The Local Guide to L TEX on the Plymouth Prime System (U05.04201).

a How does L TEX work?

a In order to use L TEX you generate a le containing both the text that you wish to print and a instructions to tell L TEX how you want it to appear. You will normally create this le using your systems text editor. You can give the le any name you like, but it should end .TEX to identify a the les contents. You then get L TEX to process the le, and it creates a new le of typesetting commands; this has the same name as your le but the .TEX ending is replaced by .DVI. This stands for Dev ice I ndependent and, as the name implies, this le can be used to create output on a range of printing devices. Your local guide will go into more detail. 1

a Rather than encourage you to dictate exactly how your document should be laid out, L TEX instructions allow you describe its logical structure. For example, you can think of a quotation embedded within your text as an element of this logical structure: you would normally expect a quotation to be displayed in a recognisable style to set it o from the rest of the text. A human typesetter would a recognise the quotation and handle it accordingly, but since L TEX is only a computer program it a requires your help. There are therefore L TEX commands that allow you to identify quotations and aTEX to typeset them correctly. as a result allow L a Fundamental to L TEX is the idea of a document style that determines exactly how a document a will be formatted. L TEX provides standard document styles that describe how standard logical structures (such as quotations) should be formatted. You may have to supplement these styles by specifying the formatting of logical structures peculiar to your document, such as mathematical formulae. You can also modify the standard document styles or even create an entirely new one, though you should know the basic principles of typographical design before creating a radically new style. There are a number of good reasons for concentrating on the logical structure rather than on the appearance of a document. It prevents you from making elementary typographical errors in the mistaken idea that they improve the aesthetics of a documentyou should remember that the primary function of document design is to make documents easier to read, not prettier. It is more exible, since you only need to alter the denition of the quotation style to change the appearance of all the quotations in a document. Most important of all, logical design encourages better writing. A visual system makes it easier to create visual eects rather than a coherent structure; logical design encourages you to concentrate on your writing and makes it harder to use formatting as a substitute for good writing.

a A Sample L TEX le

a Have a look at the example L TEX le in Figure ??. It is a slightly modied copy of the standard aTEX example le SMALL.TEX. Your local guide will tell you how you can make your own copy of L this le. The line numbers down the left-hand side are not part of the le, but have been added to make it easier to identify various portions. Also have a look at Figure ?? which shows, more or less, the result of processing this le.

3.1

Running Text

Most documents consist almost entirely of running textwords formed into sentences, which are in turn formed into paragraphsand the example le is no exception. Describing running text poses 2

1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21: 22: 23: 24: 25: 26: 27: 28: 29: 30: 31: 32: 33: 34: 35: 36: 37: 38: 39:

% % % % % % %

SMALL.TEX -- Released 5 July 1985 USE THIS FILE AS A MODEL FOR MAKING YOUR OWN LaTeX INPUT FILE. EVERYTHING TO THE RIGHT OF A % IS A REMARK TO YOU AND IS IGNORED BY LaTeX. WARNING! DO NOT TYPE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING 10 CHARACTERS EXCEPT AS DIRECTED: & $ # % _ { } ^ ~ \ % YOUR INPUT FILE MUST CONTAIN THESE % TWO LINES PLUS THE \end COMMAND AT % THE END

\documentstyle[11pt,a4]{article} \begin{document}

\section{Simple Text}

% THIS COMMAND MAKES A SECTION TITLE.

Words are separated by one or more spaces. Paragraphs are separated by one or more blank lines. The output is not affected by adding extra spaces or extra blank lines to the input file.

Double quotes are typed like this: quoted text. Single quotes are typed like this: single-quoted text. Long dashes are typed as three dash characters---like this. Italic text is typed like this: {\em this is italic text}. Bold text is typed like this: {\bf this is bold text}. \subsection{A Warning or Two} % THIS MAKES A SUBSECTION TITLE.

If you get too much space after a mid-sentence period---abbreviations like etc.\ are the common culprits)---then type a backslash followed by a space after the period, as in this sentence. Remember, dont type the 10 special characters (such as dollar sign and backslash) except as directed! The following seven are printed by typing a backslash in front of them: \$ \& \# \% \_ \{ and \}. The manual tells how to make other symbols. \end{document} % THE INPUT FILE ENDS LIKE THIS

a Figure 1: A Sample L TEX File

Simple Text

Words are separated by one or more spaces. Paragraphs are separated by one or more blank lines. The output is not aected by adding extra spaces or extra blank lines to the input le. Double quotes are typed like this: quoted text. Single quotes are typed like this: singlequoted text. Long dashes are typed as three dash characterslike this. Italic text is typed like this: this is italic text. Bold text is typed like this: this is bold text.

1.1

A Warning or Two

If you get too much space after a mid-sentence periodabbreviations like etc. are the common culprits)then type a backslash followed by a space after the period, as in this sentence. Remember, dont type the 10 special characters (such as dollar sign and backslash) except as directed! The following seven are printed by typing a backslash in front of them: $ & # % { and }. The manual tells how to make other symbols. Figure 2: The result of processing the sample le

a no problems, you just type it in naturally. In the output that it produces, L TEX will ll lines and adjust the spacing between words to give tidy left and right margins. The spacing and distribution of the words in your input le will have no eect at all on the eventual output. Any number of a spaces in your input le are treated as a single space by L TEX, it also regards the end of each line as a space between words (see lines 1517). A new paragraph is indicated by a blank line in your input le, so dont leave any blank lines unless you really wish to start a paragraph. a L TEX reserves a number of the less common keyboard characters for its own use. The ten characters # $ % & ~ _ ^ \ { }

a should not appear as part of your text, because if they do L TEX will get confused.

3.2

a L TEX Commands

a There are a number of words in the le that start \ (see lines 9, 10 and 13). These are L TEX commands and they describe the structure of your document. There are a number of things that you should realise about these commands: a All L TEX commands consist of a \ followed by one or more characters. a L TEX commands should be typed using the correct mixture of upper- and lower-case letters. \BEGIN is not the same as \begin. Some commands are placed within your text. These are used to switch things, like dierent typestyles, on and o. The \em command is used like this to emphasise text, normally by changing to an italic typestyle (see line 25). The command and the text are always enclosed between { and }the {\em turns the eect on and and the } turns it o. There are other commands that look like \command{text} In this case the text is called the argument of the command. The \section command is like this (see line 13). Sometimes you have to use curly brackets {} to enclose the argument, sometimes square brackets [], and sometimes both at once. There is method behind this apparent madness, but for the time being you should be sure to copy the commands exactly as given.

 When a commands name is made up entirely of letters, you must make sure that the end of the command is marked by something that isnt a letter. This is usually either the opening bracket around the commands argument, or its a space. When its a space, that space is a always ignored by L TEX. We will see later that this can sometimes be a problem.

3.3

Overall structure

a There are some L TEX commands that must appear in every document. The actual text of the document always starts with a \begin{document} command and ends with an \end{document} command (see lines 10 and 39). Anything that comes after the \end{document} command is ignored. Everything that comes before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble. a The preamble can only contain L TEX commands to describe the documents style. One command that must appear in the preamble is the \documentstyle command (see line 9). This command species the overall style for the document. Our example le is a simple technical document, and uses the article style, modied to print in eleven-point type on A4 paper. There are other styles that you can use, as you will nd out later on in this document.

3.4

Other Things to Look At

a L TEX can print both opening and closing quote characters, and can manage either of these either single or double. To do this it uses the two quote characters from your keyboard: and . You will probably think of as the ordinary single quote character which probably looks like or ' on your keyboard, and as a funny character that probably appears as `. You type these characters once for single quote (see line 21), and twice for double quotes (see line 20). The double quote character " itself is almost never used. a L TEX can produce three dierent kinds of dashes. A long dash, for use as a punctuation symbol, as is typed as three dash characters in a row, like this --- (see line 23). A shorter dash, used between numbers as in 1020, is typed as two dash characters in a row, while a single dash character is used as a hyphen. a From time to time you will need to include one or more of the L TEX special symbols in your text. Seven of them can be printed by making them into commands by proceeding them by backslash (see line 36). The remaining three symbols can be produced by more advanced commands, as can symbols that do not appear on your keyboard such as , , , , c , and . a It is sometimes useful to include comments in a L TEX le, to remind you of what you have done a or why you did it. Everything to the right of a % sign is ignored by L TEX, and so it can be used to introduce a comment. 6

Document Styles and Style Options

a There are four standard document styles available in L TEX: article intended for short documents and articles for publication. Articles do not have chapters, and when \maketitle is used to generate a title (see Section ??) it appears at the top of the rst page rather than on a page of its own. report intended for longer technical documents. It is similar to article, except that it contains chapters and the title appears on a page of its own. book intended as a basis for book publication. Page layout is adjusted assuming that the output will eventually be used to print on both sides of the paper. letter intended for producing personal letters. This style will allow you to produce all the elements of a well laid out letter: addresses, date, signature, etc. These standard styles can be modied by a number of style options. They appear in square brackets after the \documentstyle command. Only one style can ever be used but you can have more than one style option, in which case their names should be separated by commas. The standard style options are: 11pt prints the document using eleven-point type for the running text rather that the ten-point type normally used. Eleven-point type is about ten percent larger than ten-point. 12pt prints the document using twelve-point type for the running text rather than the ten-point type normally used. Twelve-point type is about twenty percent larger than ten-point. twoside causes documents in the article or report styles to be formatted for printing on both sides of the paper. This is the default for the book style. twocolumn produces two column on each page. titlepage causes the \maketitle command to generate a title on a separate page for documents in the article style. A separate page is always used in both the report and book styles. a There is one further option which, while not standard to L TEX, is very useful in all European countries. The a4 option causes the output in all of the standard styles to be adjusted to t a correctly on A4 paper. L TEX was designed in America where the standard paper is shorter and slightly wider than A4; without this option you will nd that your output looks a little strange. 7

Environments

a We mentioned earlier the idea of identifying a quotation to L TEX so that it could arrange to typeset it correctly. To do this you enclose the quotation between the commands \begin{quotation} and a \end{quotation}. This is an example of a L TEX construction called an environment. A number of special eects are obtained by putting text into particular environments.

5.1

Quotations

There are two environments for quotations: quote and quotation. quote is used either for a short quotation or for a sequence of short quotations separated by blank lines:
US presidents ... pithy remarks: \begin{quote} The buck stops here. I am not a crook. \end{quote} US presidents have been known for their pithy remarks: The buck stops here. I am not a crook.

Use the quotation environment for quotations that consist of more than one paragraph. Paragraphs in the input are separated by blank lines as usual:
Here is some advice to remember: \begin{quotation} Environments for making ...other things as well. Many problems ...environments. \end{quotation} Here is some advice to remember: Environments for making quotations can be used for other things as well. Many problems can be solved by novel applications of existing environments.

5.2

Centering and Flushing

Text can be centred on the page by putting it within the center environment, and it will appear ush against the left or right margins if it is placed within the flushleft or flushright a environments. Notice the spelling of centerunfortunately L TEX doesnt understand the English spelling.

Text within these environments will be formatted in the normal way, in particular the ends of the lines that you type are just regarded as spaces. To indicate a newline you need to type the \\ command. For example:
\begin{center} one two three \\ four \\ five \end{center} one two three four ve

5.3

Lists

There are three environments for constructing lists. In each one each new item is begun with an \item command. In the itemize environment the start of each item is given a marker, in the enumerate environment each item is marked by a number. These environments can be nested within each other in which case the amount of indentation used is adjusted accordingly:
\begin{itemize} \item Itemized lists are handy. \item However, dont forget \begin{enumerate} \item The item command. \item The end command. \end{enumerate} \end{itemize} Itemized lists are handy. However, dont forget 1. The item command. 2. The end command.

The third list making environment is description. In a description you specify the item labels inside square brackets after the \item command. For example:
Three animals that you should know about are: \begin{description} \item[gnat] A small animal... \item[gnu] A large animal... \item[armadillo] A ... \end{description} Three animals that you should know about are: gnat A small animal that causes no end of trouble. gnu A large animal that causes no end of trouble. armadillo A medium-sized animal.

5.4

Tables

a Because L TEX will almost always convert a sequence of spaces into a single space, it can be rather dicult to lay out tables. See what happens in this example
\begin{flushleft} Income Expenditure Result \\ 20s 0d 19s 11d happiness \\ 20s 0d 20s 1d misery \\ \end{flushleft} Income Expenditure Result 20s 0d 19s 11d happiness 20s 0d 20s 1d misery

The tabbing environment overcomes this problem. Within it you set tabstops and tab to them much like you do on a typewriter. Tabstops are set with the \= command, and the \> command moves to the next stop. The \\ command is used to separate each line. A line that ends \kill produces no output, and can be used to set tabstops:
\begin{tabbing} Income \=Expenditure \= \kill Income \>Expenditure \>Result \\ 20s 0d \>19s 11d \>Happiness \\ 20s 0d \>20s 1d \>Misery \\ \end{tabbing} Income Expenditure Result 20s 0d 19s 11d Happiness 20s 0d 20s 1d Misery

Unlike a typewriters tab key, the \> command always moves to the next tabstop in sequence, even if this means moving to the left. This can cause text to be overwritten if the gap between two tabstops is too small.

5.5

Verbatim Output

Sometimes you will want to include text exactly as it appears on a terminal screen. For example, a you might want to include part of a computer program. Not only do you want L TEX to stop playing around with the layout of your text, you also want to be able to type all the characters on a your keyboard without confusing L TEX. The verbatim environment has this eect:

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The section of program in question is: \begin{verbatim} { this finds %a & %b } for i := 1 to 27 do begin table[i] := fn(i); process(i) end; \end{verbatim}

The section of program in question is: { this finds %a & %b } for i := 1 to 27 do begin table[i] := fn(i); process(i) end;

Type Styles

We have already come across the \em command for changing typeface. Here is a full list of the available typefaces: \rm Roman \em Emphatic \bf Boldface \it Italic \sl Slanted \sf Sans Serif \sc Small Caps \tt Typewriter

Remember that these commands are used inside a pair of braces to limit the amount of text that they eect. In addition to the eight typeface commands, there are a set of commands that alter the size of the type. These commands are: \tiny \small \scriptsize \normalsize \footnotesize \large \Large \LARGE \huge \Huge

Sectioning Commands and Tables of Contents

Technical documents, like this one, are often divided into sections. Each section has a heading a containing a title and a number for easy reference. L TEX has a series of commands that will allow a you to identify dierent sorts of sections. Once you have done this L TEX takes on the responsibility of laying out the title and of providing the numbers. The commands that you can use are:

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\chapter \section

\subsection \subsubsection

\paragraph \subparagraph

The naming of these last two is unfortunate, since they do not really have anything to do with paragraphs in the normal sense of the word; they are just lower levels of section. In most document styles, headings made with \paragraph and \subparagraph are not numbered. \chapter is not available in document style article. The commands should be used in the order given, since sections are numbered within chapters, subsections within sections, etc. A seventh sectioning command, \part, is also available. Its use is always optional, and it is used to divide a large document into series of parts. It does not alter the numbering used for any of the other commands. Including the command \tableofcontents in you document will cause a contents list to be included, containing information collected from the various sectioning commands. You will notice a that each time your document is run through L TEX the table of contents is always made up of the a headings from the previous version of the document. This is because L TEX collects information for the table as it processes the document, and then includes it the next time it is run. This can a sometimes mean that the document has to be processed through L TEX twice to get a correct table of contents.

Producing Special Symbols

a You can include in you L TEX document a wide range of symbols that do not appear on you your keyboard. For a start, you can add an accent to any letter: o ` o oo o \{o} \={o} \t{oo} \"{o} o o o o \~{o} \H{o} \b{o} \u{o} o \v{o} o \d{o} . o \c{o} o \^{o} \{o} o o \.{o}

A number of other symbols are available, and can be used by including the following commands: \dag \ddag \oe \S \P \OE 12 c \copyright \pounds \AE

\AE \o \E !

a ...

\aa \O \ss \ldots

A l a L TEX

\AA \l ? \LaTeX

There is also a \today command that prints the current date. When you use these commands a remember that L TEX will ignore any spaces that follow them, so that you can type \pounds 20 a to get 20. However, if you type LaTeX is wonderful you will get L TEXis wonderfulnotice a the lack of space after L TEX. To overcome this problem you can follow any of these commands by a pair of empty brackets and then any spaces that you wish to include, and you will see that a \LaTeX{} really is wonderful! (L TEX really is wonderful!). a Finally, L TEX math mode, normally used to layout mathematical formulae, gives access to an even larger range of symbols, including the upper and lower case greek mathematical alphabet, calligraphic letters, mathematical operators and relations, arrows and a whole lot more. This document has not mentioned math mode, and it isnt going to either, so you will have to refer to the manual if you really need something that you cant get otherwise.

Titles

a Most documents have a title. To title a L TEX document, you include the following commands in your document, usually just after begin{document}.
\title{required title} \author{required author} \date{required date} \maketitle

If there are several authors, then their names should be separated by \and; they can also be separated by \\ if you want them to be centred on dierent lines. If the \date command is left out, then the current date will be printed.
\title{Essential \LaTeX} \author{J Warbrick\and A N Other} \date{14th February 1988} \maketitle

a Essential L TEX
J Warbrick A N Other

14th February 1988

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The exact appearance of the title varies depending on the document style. In styles report and book the title appears on a page of its own. In the article style it normally appears at the top of the rst page, the style option titlepage will alter this (see Section ??).

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Letters

a Producing letters is simple with L TEX. To do this you use the document style letter. You can make any number of letters with a single input le. Your name and address, which are likely to be the same for all letters, are given once at the top of the le. Each letter is produced by a letter environment, having the name and address of the recipient as its argument. The letter itself begins with an \opening command to generate the salutation. The letter ends with a \closing command, you can use the commands \encl and \cc to generate lists of enclosures and people to whom you are sending copies. Any text that follows the \closing must be proceeded by a \ps command. This command produces no textyoull have to type P.S. yourselfbut is needed to format the additional text correctly. Perhaps an example will make this clearer:
\documentstyle{letter} \begin{document} \address{1234 Avenue of the Armadillos \\ Gnu York, G.Y. 56789} \signature{R. (Ma) Dillo \\ Director of Cuisine} \begin{letter}{G. Natheniel Picking \\ Acme Exterminators \\ Illinois} \opening{Dear Nat,} Im afraid that the armadillo problem is still with us. I did everything ... ... and I hope that you can get rid of the nasty beasts this time. \closing{Best Regards,} \cc{Jimmy Carter\\Richard M. Nixon} \end{letter} \end{document}

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11

Errors

a When you create a new input le for L TEX you will probably make mistakes. Everybody does, and its nothing to be worried about. As with most computer programs, there are two sorts of a mistake that you can make: those that L TEX notices and those that it doesnt. To take a rather a silly example, since L TEX doesnt understand what you are saying it isnt going to be worried if you mis-spell some of the words in your text. You will just have to accurately proof-read your printed output. On the other hand, if you mis-spell one of the environment names in your le then a L TEXwont know what you want it to do. a When this sort of thing happens, L TEX prints an error message on your terminal screen and then stops and waits for you to take some action. Unfortunately, the error messages that it produces are rather user-unfriendly and not a little frightening. Nevertheless, if you know where to look they will probably tell you where the error is and went wrong. Consider what would happen if you mistyped \begin{itemize} so that it became \begin{itemie}. a When L TEX processes this instruction, it displays the following on your terminal:
LaTeX error. See LaTeX manual for explanation. Type H <return> for immediate help. ! Environment itemie undefined. \@latexerr ...for immediate help.}\errmessage {#1} \endgroup l.140 \begin{itemie} ?

a After typing the ? L TEX stops and waits for you to tell it what to do. a The rst two lines of the message just tell you that the error was detected by L TEX. The third line, the one that starts ! is the error indicator. It tells you what the problem is, though until you have a had some experience of L TEX this may not mean a lot to you. In this case it is just telling you a that it doesnt recognise an environment called itemie. The next two lines tell you what L TEX was doing when it found the error, they are irrelevant at the moment and can be ignored. The nal line is called the error locator, and is a copy of the line from your le that caused the problem. It start with a line number to help you to nd it in your le, and if the error was in the middle of a a a line it will be shown broken at the point where L TEX realised that there was an error. L TEX can sometimes pass the point where the real error is before discovering that something is wrong, but it doesnt usually get very far. a At this point you could do several things. If you knew enough about L TEX you might be able to a x the problem, or you could type X and press the return key to stop L TEX running while you 15

go and correct the error. The best thing to do, however, is just to press the return key. This will a allow L TEX to go on running as if nothing had happened. If you have made one mistake, then you have probably made several and you may as well try to nd them all in one go. Its much more a ecient to do it this way than to run L TEX over and over again xing one error at a time. Dont worry about remembering what the errors werea copy of all the error messages is being saved in a log le so that you can look at them afterwards. See your local guide to nd out what this le is called. If you look at the line that caused the error its normally obvious what the problem was. If you cant work out what you problem is look at the hints below, and if they dont help consult Chapter 6 of the manual. It contains a list of all of the error messages that you are likely to encounter together with some hints as to what may have caused them. Some of the most common mistakes that cause errors are A mis-spelt command or environment name. Improperly matched { and }remember that they should always come in pairs. Trying to use one of the ten special characters # $ % & _ { } ~ ^ and \ as an ordinary printing symbol. A missing \end command. A missing command argument (thats the bit enclosed in { and }). a One error can get L TEX so confused that it reports a series of spurious errors as a result. If you have an error that you understand, followed by a series that you dont, then try correcting the rst errorthe rest may vanish as if by magic. a Sometimes L TEX may write a * and stop without an error message. This is normally caused by a missing \end{document} command, but other errors can cause it. If this happens type \stop and press the return key. a Finally, L TEX will sometimes print warning messages. They report problems that were not bad a enough to cause L TEX to stop processing, but nevertheless may require investigation. The most common problems are overfull and underfull lines of text. A message like:
Overfull \hbox (10.58649pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 172--175 []\tenrm Mathematical for-mu-las may be dis-played. A dis-played

16

a indicates that L TEX could not nd a good place to break a line when laying out a paragraph. As a result, it was forced to let the line stick out into the right-hand margin, in this case by 10.6 points. Since a point is about 1/72nd of an inch this may be rather hard to see, but it will be there none the less. a This particular problem happens because L TEX is rather fussy about line breaking, and it would rather generate a line that is too long than generate a paragraph that doesnt meet its high standards. The simplest way around the problem is to enclose the entire oending paragraph between a \begin{sloppypar} and \end{sloppypar} commands. This tells L TEX that you are happy for it to break its own rules while it is working on that particular bit of text. Alternatively, messages about Underfull \hboxes may appear. These are lines that had to a have more space inserted between words than L TEX would have liked. In general there is not much that you can do about these. Your output will look ne, even if the line looks a bit stretched. About the only thing you could do is to re-write the oending paragraph!

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A Final Reminder

a You now know enough L TEX to produce a wide range of documents. But this document has only a scratched the surface of the things that L TEX can do. This entire document was itself produced a with L TEX (with no sticking things in or clever use of a photocopier) and even it hasnt used all a the features that it could. From this you may get some feeling for the power that L TEX puts at your disposal. Please remember what was said in the introduction: if you do have a complex document to produce then go and read the manual. You will be wasting your time if you rely only on what you have read here. a One other warning: having dabbled with L TEX your documents will never be the same again . . . .

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