LATEX(1)

📦 version 2022.20230122, in debian bookworm

💅 LATEX — bestie edition

okay so this whole page lives in the General Commands Manual, and it's about structured text formatting and typesetting, which is a fancy way of saying "you write the words, LaTeX makes it look gorgeous." 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

latex, pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, dvilualatex, cslatex, pdfcslatex, platex, uplatex, lamed — structured text formatting and typesetting 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

latex [first-line]

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

ngl, this manual page is a mere skeleton. Like, it's giving bare minimum and it knows it. 😭

The LaTeX language itself is described in the book LaTeX - A Document Preparation System. And here's the tea: LaTeX is a TeX macro package, not a modification to the TeX source program — so literally every single capability described in tex(1) is present. all of them. no cap. ✨

The LaTeX macros encourage writers to think about the content of their documents, rather than the form. The ideal — and bestie, it is very difficult to realize — is to have no formatting commands at all in the document (things like switch to italic'' or skip 2 picas''). Instead, everything is done by specific markup instructions: emphasize'', start a section''. it's giving semantic queen 💅

The primary source of documentation for LaTeX is the LaTeX manual referenced below. periodt.

Okay now let's meet the whole squad, because these are all different flavors of the same icon: 🌈

  • lualatex, pdflatex, pdfcslatex, xelatex are LaTeX formats based on the respective engines. All output PDF by default. 💖
  • platex, uplatex are Japanese LaTeX formats based on e-pTeX and e-upTeX (DVI output).
  • lamed is the Aleph-based LaTeX format (DVI output).
  • dvilualatex is LuaTeX-based and outputs DVI.
  • cslatex is csTeX-based (primitives integrated into pdfTeX) and outputs DVI.
🫶 on some systems latex209 and slitex may still be available for compatibility with older versions of LaTeX. These should not be used for new texts. respectfully, they're retired. leave them in the past bestie 💀

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

amstex(1), luatex(1), pdftex(1), ptex(1), tex(1), xetex(1).

  • Leslie Lamport, LaTeX - A Document Preparation System, Addison-Wesley, 1985, ISBN 020115790X.
  • Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens, Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, and Chris Rowley, LaTeX Companion, Addison-Wesley, 2004, ISBN 0201362996 (2nd edition).

The LaTeX home page is http://latex-project.org. A list of some LaTeX tutorials is at http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=man-latex. An unofficial reference manual for LaTeX is at https://ctan.org/pkg/latex2e-help-texinfo.

💖 and that's the whole page, bestie! this one came from Web2C 2022, dated 30 April 2018, and it's filed under LATEX(1) — main character energy, honestly. go write something pretty 🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from