Getting Started

This section describes how to typeset a simple paper in the standard way for processing by L^ATEX. All of the information here is also presented elsewhere in this document, but with a lot more detail; think of this section as ``the short form'' to using L^ATEX.

The first thing you need to do is to create your L^ATEX source file. This file contains all the text for your paper as well as L^ATEX commands (to be described shortly). You can use any editor you wish to create the file; documentation on how to use text editors is available from Athena. Emacs includes special code set up to make using L^ATEX easier, and is a good first choice. You can name your L^ATEX file anything you wish; the only requirement is that it end with the four characters .tex.

The general format of a L^ATEX file is shown in the following example.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{doublespace}
\usepackage{fullpage}

\title{A Sample Paper}
\author{Melissa I. Thompson}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

It was a dark and stormy night, and all of the Athena fileservers had
crashed.  Poor me, I had to write a paper for one of my HASS-D
classes.

Luckily, I was able to use a wonderful text formatting program called
\LaTeX{}, and everything worked out fine.
\end{document}

Here is a description of each part.

• The first line of every L^ATEX file contains a \documentclass command. This command tells L^ATEX the general style of your document as well as the style ``options'' you wish to use. The word in between curly braces ({ and }) is the main style. You can specify options for the style in square brackets before the main style. For example, \documentclass[12pt]{article} would use article document class in 12 point type.

• The usepackage commands specifies additional packages or styles to use. For example, the doublespace package tells L^ATEX to doublespace your document, and the fullpage option says to set the margins so you have one inch of blank space on all sides. You can supply options to these packages as well in the same way that you did to the main package (ie, in square brackets).

• The \title, \author, and \date commands are used to specify the title, author and creation date of the document. The default date is \today (meaning that you don't need to give the \date command if you just want to use the current date).

• The \begin{document} line marks the beginning of the `main' part of the document. The section before this line is called the preamble. More on this later.

• The \maketitle line tells L^ATEX to insert a title page in the beginning of your document. The data from each of the \title, author, and \date commands is used here.

• \LaTeX{} is a special command in L^ATEX, used to represent the appropriate magic so that you see ``L<sup>A</sup>TEX'' instead of ``LaTeX''.

• The \end{document} line marks the end of the main part of the document. In L^ATEX, something between \begin{foo} and \end{foo} is said to be in the foo environment (more on environments later).