Environments

If you want to change how L^ATEX treats a certain section of text (for instance changing the type style), you have to specify what text. In L^ATEX lingo, you need to indicate the scope of the command you are using to change the environment. For small sections of text, this is done by starting the environment with an open brace ({) character, followed by the command to change the defaults, and ending with the close brace } character. For example, to make appear in a larger font, you could type {\Large larger font}. This limits the scope of the large command to the environment within the braces.

An environment can also be delimited with a begin-end pair. This is quite useful for larger sections of text. For example, to center multiple lines of text,

like
these two,

you could use the following lines:

\begin{center}
like\\
these two,
\end{center}

Note the \\ following the first line. This is a command which tells L^ATEX to break the line at that point, rather than filling the text completely between the two margins like it normally does. This allows you to force lines to end when you want them to, rather than when L^ATEX wants them to.