LaTeX


LaTeX or , often stylized as aTeX is a software system for a thing that is said document preparation. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in "What You See Is What You Get" word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer as well as Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general design of a solution document to stylise text throughout a document such(a) as bold and italics, as well as to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to score an output file such as PDF or DVI suitable for printing or digital distribution.

LaTeX is widely used in academia for the communication and publication of scientific documents in many fields, including mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics, chemistry, 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 script for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language.

LaTeX can be used as a standalone document preparation system, or as an intermediate format. In the latter role, for example, this is the sometimes used as part of a pipeline for translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF. The typesetting system ensures programmable desktop publishing atttributes and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing of structures and figures, chapter and constituent headings, the inclusion of graphics, page layout, indexing and bibliographies.

Like TeX, LaTeX started as a writing tool for mathematicians and computer scientists, but even from early in its development, it has also been taken up by scholars who needed to write documents that put complex math expressions or non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Devanagari and Chinese.

LaTeX is pointed to provide a high-level, descriptive markup Linguistic communication that accesses the energy to direct or creation of TeX in an easier way for writers. In essence, TeX handles the array side, while LaTeX handles the content side for document processing. LaTeX comprises a collection of TeX macros and a code to process LaTeX documents, and because the plain TeX formatting commands are elementary, it helps authors with ready-made commands for formatting and layout specifics such as chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and bibliographies.

LaTeX was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport at SRI International. The current description is LaTeX2e stylised as aTeX2ε, released in 1994, but updated in 2020. LaTeX3 aTeX3 has been under long-term development since the early 1990s. LaTeX is free software and is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License LPPL.

How it works


The example below shows the input to LaTeX and the corresponding output from the system: