Formatting Information

LATEX is not a graphic design package, but it excels at implementing typographic layouts already made because this is what it was intended for. Earlier in this document we looked at formatting for the body of a document: the height and width, paper size, margins, and running headlines and footlines. We also covered the ‘pool’ of textual features like footnotes, paragraphs, block quotations, lists, indexes, tables, and figures, so you already know how to deal with those. And we saw how to deal with the ‘flow’ of formatting that goes inline to the text, like emphasis, citation, inline lists, index points, glossary items, and cross-references.

The most immediately visible parts of the document are the remainder: the ‘metadata’ for the title page and preliminaries, and the ‘hierarchy’ of sectioning (parts, chapters, sections, subsections etc, and appendixes). There are also some hints about how to achieve a few special effects like images that bleed off the edge of the paper, and backgrounds that cover the entire page, not just the text area.