How to Use LaTeX for Text Formatting

LaTeX (pronounced lay-tek or lah-tek) is a typesetting software primarily used to typeset documents containing a lot of math. It's widely used throughout the academic world to publish technical journals or books, but has more applications...

Steps

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Install a LaTeX distribution. First of all, using LaTeX is free. There is no need to buy a program, since a myriad of tools are available as free downloads. The choice of an editor is a matter of personal preference and your operating system. If you're using a PC, you probably want to install MikTeX as a beginner, as it provides you with everything you need out of the box.ution you use depends on your computer's operating system. As a GNU/Linux user, you will probably find the texlive package in your repository and you can easily install it through your distribution's package manager. Also for Mac/OSX there are several tools available. One of them is gwTeX. If you want to get started right away, you can also try using an online editor for LaTeX such as writelatex.com.
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Find a tutorial. By querying the search engine of your choice for tutorials, you can choose from plenty of tutorials on the internet. There are offline tutorials available as PDF such as The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e, plain text tutorials from many universities (e.g. A Tutorial from Cornell or David Wilkins's Primer). For more detailed documentation, you can refer to LaTeX in Wikibooks.
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Find an example document similar to the document you want to write. For example, a PH.D. dissertation written in LaTeX may be a set of files or a single file. The file with the '.tex' extension will be the one containing the actual document. Example documents can be found at these useful sites: IIT Bombay, Univ. of Michigan, and many more.
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Build the document. What the LaTeX software does is convert a text file (written in its markup language) into a document. This can be a cumbersome step. Once the first build is finished the rest are easy.
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Modify the document to suit your needs. Once the template has been built, it is not difficult to modify it to suit your needs.
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Maintain an organized list of links with information on LaTeX. LaTeX is a sophisticated software package and the possibilities are endless. Some sites may treat many aspects of LaTeX, some only a few specific ones.