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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX
Most people these days do their LATEXing in a graphical editor, running in a modern operating system that uses windows, icons, menus, fonts, and a mouse with a pointer. This works fine 95% of the time, when you’re dealing with one or two documents at a time, and everything you want to do is accessible through the menus, and you really don’t need to see LATEX spilling its guts all over the place every time it reformats the document. Click here, move to there, cut, move somewhere else, paste, edit the text, write some more, click and you’re done.
However, life isn’t always that easy. Sometimes things go wrong, and you need to open the lid and find out what it was. This appendix is a short description of how to run LATEX manually, via the command-line, instead of through your editor, so that you can get to see exactly what is going on. It also covers error messages, and a few internal details about viewing and printing.
The editor wasn’t always the interface to TEX: it was only used for writing and editing the document. Before editors with built-in LATEX controls became available, you had to leave your editor — or at least go to another window — and key in a command to typeset your document, then another to view it or print it. For a small number of people, running LATEX this way is still the order of the day.
Some people work on remote systems on old-style consoles with no graphics, just a 3270 or VT-100 terminal like those in Figure B.1 below;
Some might be using a smartphone where the editing facilities are limited and the scope for full menus entirely absent;
Some users are simply uninterested in all the bells and whistles of the modern interface, with too many menus doing things they can actually do faster typing instructions by hand;
Some users need automation facilities that most LATEX editors don’t have, like the ability to apply the same edit to thousands of documents while you go and have a coffee or get on with something else;
And some are writing systems where LATEX is an embedded typesetter, so they’re actually working in a completely different scripting or programming language which does a lot of other things before calling on LATEX behind the scenes to do some typesetting.
Images courtesy of Wikipedia. Left: IBM 3279 display by Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island (CC BY-SA 3.0); Right: DEC VT100 terminal by Jason Scott (Flickr IMG_9976, CC BY 2.0), at the Living Computer Museum (apparently connected to the museum’s DEC PDP-11/70).
Before I go any further I’m going to assume at this stage that you have typed a document (for example the first code listing in this section above), and that you have saved it as a plaintext file with a filetype of .tex and a name of your own choosing, following the rules in the sidebar ‘Picking suitable filenames’ above, an that you know how to open a terminal window and type commands.
