LaTeX is freeform in that one simply types ASCII strings in a text
editor. You do not attempt to e.g. format your text using the editor.
Instead, you embed certain commands, themselves ordinary strings, in the
text as you write it. When the LaTeX system is run over your file, it
will read the commands and carry out the relevant actions. Normally, you
will have a separate viewer program that allows you to inspect the
formatted result and to print it off. Commands are distinguished in that
they begin with a character. Some commands have arguments,
others do not. Many commands come in
\begin
-- \end
pairs,
thus you have to specify where you want some effect to start and
where it should end. Other commands demand that you place the text
affected within curly braces. We will see examples below. Thus, you can
only see what the output looks like after you have run LaTeX, which is
odd for those who are used to WYSIWYG word processors. One advantage,
however, is that files can easily be mailed and exchanged. Moreover, one
can get very sophisticated control over text layout. Where LaTeX falls
down in terms of easiness of use is where diagrams are concerned. We will
see how to get round this below.
A major plus in using LaTeX is that it is generally straightforward to effect a conversion from LaTeX to HTML, this being more or less a mapping from one mark-up language to another. We use the LaTeX2HTML package for conversion, which is very well supported and with which the editing team has valuable experience.
A document must have a \documentclass
declaration at the top. The
one recommended for EAGLES is to be found at the top of the file
initial.tex which should be included at the beginning of your own text.
However, special considerations apply if you are working on a joint
document: you may be asked by your editor to supply only parts of an
overall document and may thus not need to wrap your text up as a document
-- however, it would aid editors enormously if you were able to treat
your own text as a document while you wrote it, in order to make sure the
text can in fact be processed properly when the editor eventually integrates
it in the overall document.
The text body of each document begins after the command
\begin{document}
and the entire document (plus bibliography, etc.)
ends with the command \end{document}
. Prior to
\begin{document}
you will find declarations that govern e.g. page
dimensions, line spacing and so on. These are again part of the contents
of initial.tex.
In a large report consisting of many sub-parts, use the
LaTeX \input{}
command to include a series of files. Here is
an example, where three files called intro.tex, nouns.tex and
verbs.tex are included. Do not use the \include
command.
New pages may not be necessary in some LaTeX styles.
\newpage \input{intro} \newpage \input{nouns} \newpage \input{verbs}