A Quick and Dirty Guide to LaTeX

sample document

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Below is a sample latex document. If you'd like, you can download this document as a .tex file to play with. Also, please look at the finished .pdf file, and see how this .tex file is converted to a finished document.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}


\begin{document}


\title{Sample LaTeX Document}
\author{Christina Huggins}
\date{February 2004}
\maketitle

\section{Here is a Section Header}

Here is some document text. And here is an \emph{emphasized} word, as well as a \textbf{boldfaced} word. If I wanted to start a new paragraph, I would just insert a blank line in to the LaTeX document.

Like so. Note that LaTeX ignores extra white space --- if I had inserted \emph{two} blank lines in between this and the last paragraph, LaTeX would have ignored it. LaTeX would also ignore any extra spaces in between my words: if I wanted extra spaces I would need to tell LaTeX to insert a non-breaking space by inserting a ``~\~~''. % And % note here that I had to print the ``~'' % with a special command ``\~'' Here is a sentence ~~ with ~~ extra ~~ spaces ~~ inserted.

\section{Here is Another Section Header}

Okay, now I've started another section. Note that LaTeX automatically numbers these sections for you.

Hmmmm...what else can we show you here? How about a footnote? Those are quite easy to insert. \footnote{See? How easy is that?!}

We can also easily insert a list:
\begin{itemize}
\item Here is an item on our list.
\item And here is another.
\item And another
\end{itemize}

Quite fun. Okay, I suppose I will end this sample LaTeX document. Please also see the finished .pdf file --- and see how beautiful this document turns out to be!


\end{document}

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