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1 Overview of LaTeX

The LaTeX command typesets a file of text using the TeX program and the LaTeX “macro package” for TeX. To be more specific, it processes an input file containing the text of a document with interspersed commands that describe how the text should be formatted. It produces at least three files as output:

  1. A main output file, which is one of:
    1. If invoked as latex, a “Device Independent” (.dvi) file. This contains commands that can be translated into commands for a variety of output devices. You can view such .dvi output of LaTeX by using a program such as xdvi (display directly) or dvips (convert to PostScript).
    2. If invoked as pdflatex, a “Portable Document Format” (.pdf) file. Typically, this is a self-contained file, with all fonts and images embedded. This can be very useful, but it does make the output much larger than the .dvi produced from the same document.

    There are other less-common variants of LaTeX (and TeX) as well, which can produce HTML, XML, and other things.

  2. A “transcript” or .log file that contains summary information and diagnostic messages for any errors discovered in the input file.
  3. An “auxiliary” or .aux file. This is used by LaTeX itself, for things such as sectioning.

A LaTeX command begins with the command name, which consists of a \ followed by either (a) a string of letters or (b) a single non-letter. Arguments contained in square brackets, [], are optional while arguments contained in braces, {}, are required.

LaTeX is case sensitive. Enter all commands in lower case unless explicitly directed to do otherwise.