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Why LaTeX?
- It is arguably the premier typesetting package in the world.
Knuth and Lamport have distilled for us the accumulated wisdom of
generations of Western printers.
- The TeX system typesets documents with line and page breaks
to maximise readability and appeal by avoiding as far as possible
poor breaks and hyphenation.
- The defaults of LaTeX implement best practice for readability
of your content, see
Instructional typographies using desktop publishing techniques to produce effective learning and training materials
- It is simply the best package for documents containing mathematics.
“TeX can print virtually any mathematical thought that comes into
your head, and print it beautifully.” [Herbert S. Wilf, 1986]
- It is free on virtually every operating system/computer in the world.
- It is portable—stick to the standard commands and everyone can
read and exchange documents.
- The source file is purely alphanumeric so it can be read by eye or
posted by e-mail with no problems associated with different versions or
binary files.
- LaTeX has the reputation of being hard, but in fact it is effectively
the same as HTML!—the typesetting markup is embedded in the
document by the author.
- LaTeX is not WYSIWYG—some may consider this a weakness
when in fact it is a strength. It allows the author to concentrate
on the content first and foremost and then on the markup and spelling.
Note: the ‘X’ in LaTeX or TeX is pronounced
as a hard sound as in the ‘ck’ in ‘teck’.
The word TeX is actually the uppercase form of
τεχ —the Greek “tech”
TeX and LaTeX Books
- LaTeX: A Document Preparation System Lamport
- The LaTeX Companion Mittelbach et al.
- The LaTeX Graphics Companion Goossens et al.
- Guide to LaTeX Kopka and Daly
- The TeXbook Knuth, Donald E.
Links to Useful LaTeX documents
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