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LaTeX Basics

Terms/General

LaTeX is case sensitive: use lowercase for commands unless specifically directed otherwise. LaTeX makes .dvi files, dvi stands for Device Independent.

Commands

Commands are necessary to tell LaTeX how to process your document. Commands in LaTeX always begin with a backslash: \
Simple commands must be separated from text by at least one space; for instance, \begin{center} needs one space after it before you begin typing text. But, simple commands can be separated by as much as you'd like for visual clarity, so it's often a lot easier to have a command like \begin{center} and then skip a line for text, like this:
\begin{center}
Then the text of your document.

Many commands are followed by arguments. When commands are followed by arguments, the format is:
\command{argument}

From the sample page, some examples of commands with arguments are:
\section*{My first document}
\url{http://www.silmaril.ie/downloads/}

Another example of a command with an argument is \documentclass{article} this tells LaTeX to read your work as a document, and one formatted as an article. Articles don't have separate title pages, but chapters and books do, so if you want to have separate title pages from the actual text of the work, you would do \documentclass{chapter} or \documentclass{book}.

Defining the Document

LaTeX needs the document to be defined in order to properly process the document. This is the first item defined in a LaTeX document and it's defined with the command \documentclass[options]{class}.

Document Classes:

Document Class Options

Page Styles

LaTeX supports three predefined header/footer combinations, which are often called page styles. The style parameter of the command defines which one to use. The command to call a page style is:
\pagestyle{style}

The predefined page styles are:

It is also possible to change the page style of the current page with the command:
\thispagestyle{style}

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