Formatting Information

See, for example, the list of TEX vendors in Table 1 below, and the list of consultants published by TUG. 

A guesstimate. With free software it’s virtually impossible to tell how many people are using it. 

GNU’s Not Unix (GNU) is a project to create a completely free computing system — ‘free’ meaning both free from encumbrances and restrictions as well as free of charge. 

Knuth still fixes bugs, although the chance of finding a bug in TEX these days approaches zero. 

Not a wordprocessor like Microsoft Word, Libre Office, Lotus Notes, Apple Pages, or Corel WordPerfect; and not a ‘dumb’ editor like Apple TextEdit or Microsoft Notepad. 

Y&Y, Mackichan Software, PC-TEX, Blue Sky, True TEX, and BaKoMa TEX [RIP Basil K Malyshev], who produced TEX distributions for many years, all appear to have ceased trading. Some of the Y&Y add-on fonts are still distributed by the TEX Users Group (see the appendix ‘User Groups’ below), or have been replaced by Open Source implementations, and there is a mailing list at the TUG web site for the support of former Y&Y users. 

Some which are straightforward are shown in Figure 1.1 below. 

Embarrassingly, the LATEX command for guillemets was mis-spelled guillemot when it was created, and no-one seems to have the nerve to change it. Albatross! 

Note for MacTEX users: the TEXShop editor that comes with MacTEX is not set for UTF-8 by default: see step 2 below for how to set it. 

Remember not everyone is lucky enough to be able to install new software: many users on business and academic networks still use old versions of TEX because they or their system managers don’t know how to update them. Local user groups may be able to provide help and support here. 

Bear in mind that the degree symbol is a non-ASCII character, so you must specify what input encoding you are using if you want to type it: see the example of the inputenc package in § 1.8 above. If you don’t want to use non-ASCII characters (or if you are using a system which cannot generate them), you can use the command \textdegree to get the degree sign. 

You will also see dollar signs used for math mode. This is quite common but deprecated: it’s what plain TEX used in the days before LATEX, and the habit got ingrained in many mathematicians. It still works as a convenient shorthand like $x=y$, as do double-dollars for display-mode math like $$E=mc^2$$, but they are only mentioned here to warn readers seeing them in other authors’ work that \(...\) and \[...\] are the proper LATEX commands. 

Readers familiar with SGML, HTML, and XML will recognise the concept as similar to the Document Type Declaration (it’s still called a ‘type’ there, not a ‘class’). 

Theses and dissertations require an Abstract, which is provided in the report class but not in the book class. Many universities provide a special thesis class of their own. 

The built-in letter class is rather idiosyncratic: there are much better ones you can use which you will find in the memoir package and the komascript bundle. 

‘Letter’ size is 8½″×11″, which is the trimmed size of the long-obsolete Demy Quarto, still in use in North America. Other common US office sizes are ‘Legal’, which is 8½″×14″, a ‘bastard’ (variant) cutting close to the old Foolscap (8¼″×13¼″); Ledger or Tabloid (11″×17″, which is exactly twice ‘Letter’, in the same way that A3 is twice A4); and ‘Executive’ (7″×10″). ISO standard ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ paper sizes, used everywhere else, are still largely unknown in most parts of North America. 

Note that the standard built-in document classes (book, article, report, or letter) only use the paper size to adjust the margins: they do not embed the paper size name in the PostScript or PDF output. For this you need the geometry package. If you are using pdfLATEX, or you intend creating PostScript output, and you want to change the default paper size, you MUST specify it both in the Document Class option and as an option to the geometry package (see the example ‘Read all about it’ below), in order to ensure that the paper size name gets embedded correctly in the output, otherwise printers may select the wrong paper tray, or reject the job. 

It is arguable that chapters also have no place in reports, either, as these are conventionally divided into sections as the top-level division. LATEX, however, assumes your reports have chapters, but this is only the default, and can be changed very simply (see § 7.6 below). 

Paragraph spacing and indentation are cultural settings. If you are typesetting in a language other than English, you should use the babel or polyglossia packages, which alter many things, including the spacing and the naming of sections, to conform with the standards of different cultures, countries, and languages. 

MiKTEX users MUST note that you cannot process .ins files inside MiKTEX’s own installation folders: you have to process them elsewhere first, hence the need for a temporary directory. 

For example, there is no separate xcolor.dtx and xcolor.ins for the xcolor package because it forms part of the graphics bundle, which is included with all LATEX systems anyway. Such packages change very rarely, as they form part of the kernel of LATEX and are very stable. You should never try to update these packages in isolation. 

Almost all of these have been updated to work with LATEX2ε, so they should be installed as in step 3 below, but there are a few remaining. 

Note that this means newsreaders for the Usenet News (NNTP) service. It does not mean syndication readers for RSS, which are a different thing entirely — these are unfortunately also sometimes referred to as ‘newsreaders’. 

It’s worth pointing out that ‘technical’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘computer technical’ or ‘engineering technical’, least of all ‘mathematical technical’: it just means it contains a lot of τέχνη, Greek for specialist material or artistry. A literary analysis such as La Textualisation de Madame Bovary (on the marginal notes in the manuscripts of Gustave Flaubert’s novel) is every bit as technical in the literary or linguistic field as the maintenance manual for the Airbus 380 is in the aircraft engineering field. 

In fact, any time you define a counter in LATEX, you automatically get a command to reproduce its value. So if you defined a new counter example to use in a teaching book, by saying \newcounter{example}, that automatically makes available the command \theexample for use when you want to display the current value of example. 

You can use the tabular environment anywhere you need stuff aligned in rows and columns, not just in a figure. 

You may find a lot of old files which use a package called epsf. Don’t use it: it’s obsolete. 

The original term Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is now deprecated in favour of the more accurate Uniform Resource Indicator (URI). For details see http://www.w3.org/Addressing/. Unfortunately the older term still persists, especially in this LATEX package and its command, and in some XML markup vocabularies. 

A number of environments which do complicated things with the category codes of characters have this requirement to end the environment with the \end{...} command on a line by itself, at the start of the line. These include the Verbatim environment from the fancyvrb package, and any of the \end{...} commands taken over by the endfloat package. 

Like this. 

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

This section is labelled normalxref, for example. 

Thus I can refer here to the label at the start of this section as \ref{normalxref} and get the value ‘§ 5.3.1’.  

It’s not clear how they refer to conventional footnotes, or if they even use them. 

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. 

Some authors — and perhaps some designers — believe that consistency is undesirable, and that double-page layouts in printed books should each be designed independently. Valerie Kirschenbaum’s magnificent Goodbye Gutenberg expresses this both eloquently and attractively, but the cost of such design labour and the cost of four-colour printing on all pages places it beyond the reach of most publishers’ budgets until the economics of on-demand four-colour ‘printing’ makes it possible. 

This does not apply for the German technique in blackletter type of using letter-spacing instead of (non-existent) italics. The defaults in the soul package were designed to cater for this. 

METAFONT creates Type 3 bitmap fonts so their appearance in some PDF viewers is a bit rough, although they print perfectly; but many of them are now available in Type 1 outline format, and some are available as TrueType or OpenType. 

The pslatex package is also said to be outdated by some experts because it implements rather long-windedly what can now be done in three commands. However, until these replace the current version, I recommend continuing to use pslatex when you want Times with Helvetica and narrow Courier. 

Although if you’re a typographer wanting to experiment with typewriter typefaces with and without serifs, you can use METAFONT or FontForgeto do exactly this kind of thing. But that’s way outside the scope of this document. 

Mathematics users should not confuse this text-mode command with \scriptstyle, which is for mathematics mode. [Thanks to Doug McKenna and David Carlisle on the TEXhax mailing list.] 

If you move all this Preamble into a package (.sty) file of your own, you don’t need these commands: the use of @ signs in command names is allowed in package and class files. 

Don’t try this at home alone, folks! This one is safe enough, but you should strictly avoid \def for a couple of years. Stick to \newcommand for now. 

XML users will appreciate that this is the reverse of the way that Local Subset modifications work in an XML DTD, where the first definition always holds, and subsequent redefinitions are ignored. 

The former OpenOffice was taken over by Apache, and is no longer regarded as a contender. 

Strictly speaking it isn’t output at this stage: XML processors build a ‘tree’ (a hierarchy) of elements in memory, and they only get ‘serialised’ at the end of processing, into a stream of characters written to a file. 

There was one once, in the mid-1990s, actually made by Microsoft: SGML Author for Word. It wasn’t an editor as its name suggested, but a converter that used Named Styles to convert losslessly from SGML to Word and back, repeatedly, so that non-tech management could edit tech documents. Just as XML was taking off, they dropped it on the floor. Go figure. See https://cora.ucc.ie/bitstream/handle/10468/1690/Human-Interfaces-to-Structured-Documents.pdf#page=393 and http://xml.silmaril.ie/downloads/sgml-author-review.pdf for more details 

On UNIX & GNU/Linux systems, including Apple Macintosh OS X, the easiest way to do this is in a Terminal window, in your Personal TEX Directory, using the command mkdir -p fonts/source/public/whatever, as this creates any intervening subdirectories for you. Under Windows, you have to create each subsubdirectory individually. 

Confusingly, Bitstream fonts (and others from similar sources) mostly have different names from the original fonts, to avoid copyright issues, so what they call Humanist 521 is actually Gill Sans. Until recently, US law only allowed the names of typefaces to be copyrighted, not the font designs themselves, leading to widespread piracy. 

Y&Y, Inc has ceased trading and their TEX distribution is not longer available, although there is email support at http://lists.ucc.ie/lists/archives/yandytex.html, and their encoding files continue to be used. 

The only one I had problems with is ‘Å’, which for some weird reason isn’t catered for in this encoding.