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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 5: Textual tools

In this chapter…

  1. Footnotes and end-notes
  2. Marginal notes
  3. References and citations
  4. Indexes and glossaries
  5. Multiple columns

Every text-handling system needs to support a repertoire of tools for doing things with text. LATEX implements many dozens, of which a small selection of the most frequently used is given here:

  • footnotes and end-notes;

  • marginal notes;

  • cross-references, both normal ones and bibliographic citations;

  • indexes and glossaries;

  • typesetting in multiple columns.

  1. Like this. 

  2. Be aware that in some disciplines where cross-references are not much used, the word ‘references’ may be used to mean ‘bibliographic references’. 

  3. This section is labelled normalxref, for example. 

  4. So I can refer here to the label of this section as \ref{normalxref} and get the value ‘§ 5.3.1 (this section)’.  

  5. The major differences between BIBTEX’s use of these files and biblatex’s use of them is that biblatex allows many more different types of fields, and is generally more up-to-date; and biber sorts UTF-8 correctly, and is more configurable. 

  6. This can be very confusing to outsiders: it’s not clear how they refer to conventional footnotes, or if they even use them. 

  7. On Unix & GNU/Linux systems (including Apple Macintosh OS X, just type the command man makeindex; the page is also available in many reference sites on the web.