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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 5: Textual tools

A tool […] can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task.

— Wikipedia, “Tool”

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 hundreds, of which a small selection of the most frequently used are covered in this chapter. Some are built into LATEX: footnotes, marginal notes, cross-references, and two-column work; the others are implemented in packages which come with LATEX (end-notes, bibliographies, glossaries, and multi-column work), or which can be downloaded from CTAN.

  1. Like this. 

  2. To be fair, some journals do provide their own class or package which allows for footnotes in the title block according to their own specifications. 

  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.