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Tobias Oetiker wrote:This document is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Book Excerpts:

LATEX is a typesetting system that is very suitable for producing scientific and mathematical documents of high typographical quality. It is also suitable for producing all sorts of other documents, from simple letters to complete books. LATEX uses TEX as its formatting engine.

This short introduction describes LATEX 2e and should be sufficient for most applications of LATEX. It is split into 6 chapters:

- Chapter 1 introduces the basic structure of LATEX 2e documents.
- Chapter 2 goes into the details of typesetting documents.
- Chapter 3 explains how to typeset formulae with LATEX.
- Chapter 4 explains indexes, bibliography generation and inclusion of EPS graphics.
- Chapter 5 shows how to use LATEX for creating graphics.
- Chapter 6 contains some potentially dangerous information about how to alter the standard document layout produced by LATEX.

This book chapters should be read in order -- the book is not that big, after all. Readers are encouraged to read the examples, because a lot of the information is in the examples placed throughout the book.

LATEX is available for most computers, from the PC and Mac to large UNIX and VMS systems. On many university computer clusters one will find that a LATEX installation is available, ready to use. Each LATEX installation should provide a so-called LATEX Local Guide, which explains the things that are special to the local system. It should be contained in a file called local.tex.

The scope of this document is not to tell readers how to install and set up a LATEX system, but to teach them how to write their own documents so that they can be processed by LATEX.