Formatting Information: Writing documents

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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 1: Writing documents

In a LATEX document, you type your text along with markup to identify the important bits by name, for example ‘title’, ‘author’, ‘chapter’, ‘section’, ‘figure’, etc. LATEX does all the typesetting for you automatically, using the markup to apply the formatting rules (styles) you tell it to use.

Panel 4: Markup

This term came from printing and publishing, where described the notes on layout or the corrections to make during editing, but the practice of adding annotations to documents goes back to the beginning of writing.

It now means instructions or descriptions added to a computer document to act as guidelines for identification or formatting. Markup has been around for a very long time.

	Anon, ‘Leabhar na h-Uidhri: The Book of the Dun Cow’	1100
	Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, ‘Scribner’s Magazine’	1932
.h1 Interest Rates	Runoff, Script	1960s
:h1.Interest Rates	GML/DCF	c.1975
@Heading[Interest Rates]	Scribe	c.1976
\section{Interest Rates}	LATEX	1984
<sec><ttl>Interest Rates</ttl>...	SGML (AAP)	1985
<div1><head>Interest Rates</head>...	SGML (TEI)	1989
<H1>Interest Rates</H1>	SGML (HTML)	1989
<sect1><title>Interest Rates</title>	XML (DocBook)	1995
<h1>Interest Rates</h1>	XML (HTML5)	2005

Some of the history of computer markup can be seen in the names (h1 and H1, section, sec, sect1, etc). Anglo-American influence in computing means most common systems are based on English-language names, although they can be used in any language.

In the sidebar ‘Markup’ you can see some examples of markup over the years. In the manuscript era (before printing) scribes often added extra information to what they were copying. In the days of the typewriter, publishers would add markup to the author’s typescript so the printer would know what to do with it. When computers started to be used for text processing, systems tended to follow the established conventions: the similarity between the computer forms is striking, and not coincidental.

LATEX markup is all in (American) English, with a few abbreviations for long words to minimise typing. Most people use an editor with a menu or toolbar button which knows about markup, so actually typing it is rare except for the beginner.

You do not need to format any of your text in your editor, because LATEX does the formatting all by itself when it typesets. You can of course regularise or neaten its appearance in your editor for your own ease of editing (for example, keeping each item in a list on a separate line), but this is not required.

You will often hear LATEX markup referred to as ‘commands’ or sometimes ‘control sequences’ (the proper TEXnical term for them). For all practical purposes these terms all mean the same thing.

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