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LaTeX Beginner's Guide

You're reading from   LaTeX Beginner's Guide When there‚Äôs a scientific or technical paper to write, the versatility of LaTeX is very attractive. But where can you learn about the software? The answer is this superb beginner‚Äôs guide, packed with examples and explanations.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2011
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781847199867
Length 336 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Tools
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Toc

Table of Contents (21) Chapters Close

LaTeX
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
1. Getting Started with LaTeX FREE CHAPTER 2. Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs 3. Designing Pages 4. Creating Lists 5. Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures 6. Cross-Referencing 7. Listing Content and References 8. Typing Math Formulas 9. Using Fonts 10. Developing Large Documents 11. Enhancing Your Documents Further 12. Troubleshooting 13. Using Online Resources Pop Quiz Answers Index

Time for action – writing special characters in our text


We will write a very short example printing out an amount of dollars and a percent number, then we shall try more symbols:

  1. Create a new document and enter the following lines:

    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    Statement \#1:
    50\% of \$100 makes \$50.
    More special symbols are \&, \_, \{ and \}.
    \end{document}
  2. Typeset and view the output:

What just happened?

By putting a backslash before such a special symbol, we turned it into a LaTeX command. This command has the only purpose of printing out that symbol.

Note

The command for printing a backslash is \textbackslash. If you would like to know what \\ might be used for, it is used as a shortcut for a line break command. That's a bit odd, but line breaks occur frequently whereas backslashes are rarely needed in the output, therefore this shortcut has been chosen.

There's a wealth of symbols that we can use for math formulas, chess notation, zodiac signs, music scores, and more. We don...

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