To insert a footnote into your document, use the command
\footnote, followed by the actual note in curly
braces. LaTeX will automatically number the footnote and place the
text in braces at the bottom of the page. The numbers reset at the
start of each chapter, but you can override this default.
If you want to use endnotes instead of footnotes (where all the
notes are placed at the end of your document, rather than at the
bottom of the page), then you need to use a package called
"endnote".
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Since certain characters are used in LaTeX commands (e.g., the
backslash and curly braces), if you want to actually print these
characters in your document, there are special commands that tell
LaTeX to print these characters (not to treat them as part of a
command). Here are some of those characters, along with the
commands to print them:
| character | command |
| \ | $\backslash$ |
| $ | \$ |
| % | \% |
| ^ | \^ |
| & | \& |
| _ | \_ |
| ~ | \~ |
| # | \ |
| { | $\{$ |
| } | $\}$ |
| £ | \pounds |
Quotation marks: To get double quotes, do not use your " key. Rather, use two ` and ' keys, like ``this''.
Accents: You can use the following commands (but I believe you
have to use a certain package which you declare in the document
header: \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc})
| character | command |
| é | \'e |
| è | \`e |
| ê | \^e |
| ë | \"e |
| ñ | \~n |
Longer quotations that you would like to be indented from the surrounding text as a separate paragraph can be done by enclosing your quotation within the quotation environment:
\begin{quotation}...\end{quotation}\small after the
quotation environment declaration (i.e.,
\begin{quotation}\small).You can label any part of your document, and then refer to that
label in any other part of the document, and LaTeX will fill in the
cross-reference information. Label a part of you document with an
arbitrary name by using the command: \label{name}. To
make a cross-reference to that part the document, refer to the name
with: \ref{name}. LaTeX will fill in the chapter or
section number of the referred document section. If you'd like it
to fill in the page number of the referred section, use the
command: \pageref.
You use this same type of method to refer to make bibliographic
citations. A program called BibTeX manages bibliographic references
- you make a BibTeX file, with all of your bibliographic reference
information, and then you can refer to any of those references via
the following command: \cite{citename}. This puts a
cross-reference number in brackets. There are other citation
formats available in other packages, as well (see additional
resources for more information on that).
Your BibTeX file is essentially a database of all your bibliographic references. You can make this file in a text editor and save it with the .bib extension. Your bibliographic entries must adhere to a certain format, the specifics of which are beyond the scope of this document (see the resources for more information). But, here is an example for an entry that may help get you started:
@book{kane:sfw,
title = {The Significance of Free
Will},
author = {Robert Kane},
publisher = {Oxford University
Press},
year = {1998},
address = {Oxford}
}A couple of BibTeX generators & databases:
To integrate your bib file into the LaTeX document, put the following lines towards the end of your document:
\bibliography{bibfilename}
\bibliographystyle{ieeetr}
The argument for the \bibliography command is the
name of your BibTeX file, without the .bib extension. The argument
for the bibliographystyle is the name of the
bibliography style that you're using. If you don't know the
different styles available to you, try "plain".
To incorporate this information properly into your document, I've found you need to do the following (if anyone knows of a simpler way to do this, please let me know):
- Compile your tex document - you may get errors but that's okay. The compilation process produces an .aux file that's needed by the second step.
- Run the following command:
bibtex texfilename(without the .tex extension).
This does something to mesh your bib file with the LaTeX document.
Once you're finished making your .tex document, then you can compile it - which typesets your document according to the commands within the tex file and exports it as a .dvi or .pdf file (note that you have to have LaTeX installed on your system - please look at additional resources if you need to figure out how to go about getting the program). You can then open (and print) your beautifully typeset document with the appropriate viewer.
You can compile your document one of two ways: either through
the text editor you are using, or via command line. Techniques for compiling via text editor will vary. For compiling via command line, you can use pdflatex filename,
which will export your typeset file as a .pdf document, or
latex filename, which will export your file as a .dvi
document.
If your .tex document contains typos of LaTeX commands,
then your document will probably not compile correctly (or may not compile at all, depending on the extent of the errors), and you will be presented with
some error messages, at which point you will have to open up your
tex file and fix the problem before attempting to compile
again.
table of contents or check out a sample LaTeX document