LaTeX

From Linux 101, The beginner's guide to all things Linux.

LaTeX is a document typesetting package popular in the scientific community. In actuality, it is a set of macros writted for Knuth's popular TeX typesetting language.

LaTeX is not a word processor. In a word processor, you select particular formats for blocks of text. So, for example, you might choose a 18-point font and centering for a header and a 10-point font with hanging indentation for the body of a document, with italics to indicate key terms. In LaTeX, you pick document stylesets and indicate the functions of your blocks of text, letting the LaTeX macros and TeX take care of formatting things for you. In this sense, LaTeX "feels" quite like a markup language (like HTML).

LaTeX processors typically output to .dvi (device-independent) files. A variety of tools can convert these files into PostScript, PDF, and other formats. The pertinent programs on my installation of Linux are latex, dvips and dvipdf. Note that there are at least three popular versions of LaTeX out there -- LaTeX, LaTeX2e, and LaTeX3e. Compatability between them -- upward compatability, at least -- is often good, but not guaranteed, and the LaTeX-using community is not always good about changing their ways to work well with the most recent version of the software.

Often the best way to learn LaTeX, as with any other language, is to look at some documents that have been made using it, especially if you also have a line-by-line discription of what is being accomplished. The Georgia Tech Linux Users Group has a good LaTeX introduction along this vein.