Introduction to LaTeX October 9

John Burt of the English Department at Brandeis University will offer a one hour introduction to the LaTeX typesetting system in the Farber Library cluster at Brandeis University at noon on October 9.

TeX is a compiled typesetting language for producing beautiful books and articles, as well as PowerPoint-like presentations, letters, business cards, and other kinds of documents. TeX is especially adept at typesetting complicated mathematics.

Camera-ready output can be in either PostScript or Adobe PDF format. Utilities are available to convert between TeX and RTF, XML, and HTML. TeX justifies TeXt by paragraph, rather than by line, producing superior justification, and adds features of fine typesetting, such as kerning and ligatures. TeX understands the special hyphenation rules of many languages, and can set in Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari and other scripts as well.

The TeX format, LaTeX, provides the structures for large documents, such as tables of contents, sectioning, cross-references, footnotes, endnotes, and running headers. New features can be defined at will, and a large library of such features is available on the Internet. It includes BibTeX, a bibliography-management program analogous to Endnote, and MakeIndex, an index-management program which can be used with LaTeX or with printer’s galleys.

If you’d like to attend, please contact John Burt at burt@brandeis.edu (but feel free to attend even if you don’t RSVP). You can find out more information about TeX and LaTeX at http://lts.brandeis.edu/techhelp/content/cssm-tex.html and you can subscribe to a Brandeis mailing list on LaTeX and its siblings at https://lists.brandeis.edu/wws/subrequest/tex-users.