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[Una Smith]

I'm getting a lot of private e-mail asking "what is LaTeX", so...

Basically, LaTeX is a big set of TeX style files and macros that
help you produce great-looking output almost without effort, so you
can focus on content.  LaTeX takes care of spacing at the ends of
sentences, building reference lists on the fly, formatting them as
required, paragraph style, line style, everything!  Want to take a
chapter from a book and reformat it as an article?  It is done in
*seconds*.  Authors' source files are 100% portable, and LaTeX is
available for far more computers than any word processing package.

So the editors of a journal want citations in small caps?  Change
just one line to adjust the bibliography style.  Italicized names
of plant families, in a 1000-page book?  If you planned ahead and
put all family names in a wrapper, like \family{Asteraceae}, then
all you have to do is re-define \family{}.


Freeware and shareware implementations of LaTeX and related stuff:

        http://www.tug.org/interest.html#free

Commercial vendors (added fonts, special viewers, utilities, etc.):

        http://www.tug.org/interest.html#vendors


http://www.tug.org/ has numerous FAQs.  Here are some snippets:

>TeX is a typesetting program designed for high-quality composition of
>material that contains a lot of mathematical and technical expressions.
>It has been adopted by many authors and publishers who generate
>technical books and papers. It was created by Professor Donald Knuth
>of Stanford University, originally for preparation of his book series
>"The Art of Computer Programming". TeX has been made freely available
>by Knuth in a generic form.

>TeX has been tailored for and installed on almost every platform
>(computer + operating system) that one can imagine, and is available as
>freeware, shareware and commercial implementations. The TeX program is
>usually accompanied by other software to form a complete and usable
>system.

>The TeX program itself is a macro compiler. This engine is always
>required when processing any of the macro systems described below.

>TeX input consists of a stream of mixed commands and text. Commands
>can be defined for many purposes, not the least important of which
>is to permit input to be structured in a logical manner, allowing
>an author to concentrate on content rather than on typographic
>appearance.

>The most popular such macro set is LaTeX. This tool provides several
>predefined document classes (book, article, report) with extensive
>sectioning and cross-referencing capabilities, and auxiliary tools
>for such processes as bibliography and index creation. Originally
>created by Leslie Lamport, LaTeX is now maintained by a small group
>of volunteers headed by Frank Mittelbach and Chris Rowley. The current
>version identifies itself when it starts up as LaTeX 2e; older
>versions may still exist, but are not recommended for creating new
>documents. The current LaTeX distribution is always available from
>CTAN (see below).

CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (http://www.ctan.org/),
and is the main location where you can find all TeX-related software.

Hope this helps,

        Una Smith

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mailstop K-710, Los Alamos, NM  87545