Formatting information
An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Credits

Earlier editions of ‘Formatting Information’ were prompted by the generous help I received from TEX users too numerous to mention individually. Shortly after TUGboat published the November 2003 edition, I was reminded by a spate of email of the fragility of documentation for any system which is constantly under development. While the core of LATEX is as stable as ever, there been revisions to packages, issues of new distributions, new tools, new interfaces, new books and online documents, corrections to my own errors, suggestions for rewording, and in one or two cases mild abuse for having omitted package X which the author felt to be indispensable.

The current edition is the result of a few years of allowing it to lie fallow, accumulating suggestions and finding errors, but taking on board the large number of changes which daily pass in front of all of us who read comp.text.tex, and the sometimes more obvious changes visible when one installs a new version of TEX.

I am grateful as always to the people who sent me corrections and suggestions for improvement. Please keep them coming: only this way can this book reflect what people want to learn. The same limitation still applies, however: no mathematics, as there are already a dozen or more excellent books on the market — as well as online documents — dealing with mathematical typesetting in TEX and LATEX in finer and better detail than I am capable of (and listed in section 5).

As I was finishing an earlier edition, I was asked to review an article for The PracTEX Journal, which grew out of the Practical TEX Conference in 2004. The author specifically took the writers of documentation to task for failing to explain things more clearly, and as I read more, I found myself agreeing, and resolving to clear up some specific problems areas as far as possible. I was delighted to see at the Practical TEX Conference, in 2006 and later, that more presenters, especially in the Humanities, have stepped up to Peter Flom's challenge.

It is very difficult for people who write technical documentation to remember how they struggled to learn what has now become to them a familiar system. So much of what we do is second nature, and a lot of it actually has nothing to do with the software, but more with the way in which we view and approach information, and the general level of knowledge of computing. As computer systems become more sophisticated, they require less detailed knowledge from users, even while the takeup of computer usage rises. The result is a generation of users who know what they want, but who are wholly incapable of knowing when they've got it; who have only ever seen one way of doing something, and believe that if the result looks pretty, it means it must be right. As technical writers, we need to explain why, not just how, so if I have obscured something by making unreasonable assumptions about your knowledge, please let me know so that I can correct it.

Peter Flynn has been using structured text systems since the early 1980s and is author of The HTML Handbook and Understanding SGML and XML Tools, and editor of The XML FAQ (all typeset with LATEX). Peter was Ireland's first webmaster, and also runs the text management consultancy Silmaril. When not TEXing or XMLing, he likes to cook, surf, read science fiction, and listen to Early and Baroque music. In his increasingly fractal spare time he is finishing his PhD on the usability of editors for structured text.

  Online resources

There are hundreds if not thousands of web pages about how to use LATEX. The online version of this book is just one, but a couple of others I recommend are:

• Marc van Dongen's \emph{LATEX and Friends} (Author's publication, Cork, Ireland), 2011, at \url{http://csweb.ucc.ie/~dongen/LaTeX-and-Friends.pdf}

  Peter Flynn's \emph{The Very Short Guide to LATEX} (Author's publication, Cork, Ireland), 2011, at \url{http://latex.silmaril.ie/veryshortguide/veryshortguide.pdf}