2.3.1 LYX

The LYX document editor (all platforms) is a special case, as it uses the What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) model of synchronous typographic editing as opposed to What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG), and many users prefer this interface (but see the reservations in the item ‘Synchronous typographic displays’ in section 3).

LYX makes a strong case for using synchronous typographical editing: it is possible to create even quite large and complex documents without seeing a backslash very often, although with math or complex macros there is probably no way to avoid having to do some manual insertion of LATEX code.

The free availability on multiple platforms makes this a clear answer to the myth of ‘having to edit like a programmer’, and as it is an Open Source project, there is constant improvement, both to the facilities and to the interface.

Probably the only real reservation is that it does not save native LATEX files by default. It uses its own internal format, and it can export LATEX for use in other editors, but the exported files are not designed for human legibility, only for LATEX processing. In a co-operative environment this would be a serious drawback, but for the individual user this interface is an excellent tool.

2.3.2 TEXshell

This is one of the simplest of all the plaintext Windows editors, but it has most of the tools needed to begin with. Sectioning, lists, and graphics can be inserted from the menus, and there are buttons for running LATEX on the open document and for previewing the typeset document.

The syntactic highlighting distinguishes between commands and your text, and it comes with options for spellchecking (you need to install ispell), and for adding math, Greek (math), and some symbol characters from a pickchart. The typeset display is done using your installed DVI viewer (there is no provision for PDF, although as it is configurable, that could probably be edited into the menus).

Download the .tar.gz file from CTAN in the support/TeXshell/ directory and unwrap it into somewhere like C:\Program Files\TeXshell\.³ There is a tsconfig program in the same directory on CTAN, which is designed to help with reconfiguring TEXshell.

3. Yes, I know I said don't use directory names with spaces in them — and so you shouldn't, for your LATEX documents — but Windows programs are usually safe enough in them.

2.3.3 WinShell

This is another free Windows editor for beginners with LATEX. Despite its simplicity, it is capable of a considerable amount of document management and assistance with editing. As well as handling stand-alone LATEX files, you can create a ‘Project’ for larger documents, which helps you keep track of additional files like separate chapters, illustrations, diagrams, indexes, etc.

You run LATEX direct from the toolbar icons or with F-key shortcuts. Both standard LATEX and pdfLATEX are supported, as well as creation and previewing of PostScript and PDF output. There are additional toolbars for math characters, and there is a ‘Table Wizard’ for handling tables. The syntax highlighting distinguishes between commands (in blue) and delimiters (in red), leaving your text in black.

Download the WinShellnn.exe program (self-contained setup: the nn changes with the version) from CTAN in the systems/win32/winshell/ directory and double-click it to start the setup.

2.3.4 TEXnicCenter

TEXnicCenter is a powerful Windows editor suitable both for the beginner and the more advanced user. Its ‘Project’ environment keeps track of multiple files, and the processing function (the bit which actually runs LATEX, here called ‘Build’) tries to ensure that all the files you need for a large or complex document are in place before you start typesetting, to avoid errors like missing illustrations.

It's a much more wordprocessor-like control interface, with configurable toolbars and button-controls for lists, math, tables, and previewing options.

Download the TXCSetupxxx.exe program (self-contained setup: the xxx bit changes with the version) from CTAN in the systems/win32/TeXnicCenter/ directory and double-click it to start the setup.

2.3.5 WinEdt

WinEdt is a highly configurable plain-text editor for Windows. It comes with a host of special functions and shortcuts for TEX and LATEX, based on the MikTEX distribution. It is supplied on the TEX Collection 2004 DVD and the proTEXt CD. You can also download it from http://www.winedt.com — in either case there's a 1-month free trial, then it reminds you to buy it.

WinEdt uses a built-in toolbar of configurable buttons, preset for use with LATEX, and it provides syntactic coloring of LATEX commands. Both the positioning and effect of the buttons can be changed, using an editable file of icons and a configuration panel. This flexibility lets you bind a program and arguments (equivalent to a typed command) to a particular icon.

There are default buttons on the toolbar for one-click typesetting, previewing, and PostScript or PDF generation from LATEX documents, and it manages multi-file document projects like most of the other editors. Winedt is also used by many people for normal plaintext file-editing tasks, in preference to more limited programs like Notepad. If you're using the fpTEX which came with the 2003 TEX Collection, some editing of the menus is required (explained in the local installation document) because the default setup is for MikTEX/proTEXt.

2.3.6 GNU Emacs

Emacs is a product of the GNU Project.⁴ Versions are available for all makes and models of computer, and it has a LATEX-mode which provides syntactic colouring (‘fontification’ in Emacs-speak) and mouseclick processing from a menu or toolbar.

Emacs is a very large and powerful editor, with ‘modes’ (plug-ins) to handle almost everything you do on a computer. Many users run Emacs once on logging in, and never leave it for the rest of the day — or month. As well as edit, you can use it to read your mail, browse the Web, read Usenet news, do wordprocessing and spreadsheets, compile programs, help you write in any computer language — including XML and LATEX — and it provides a few games as well.

Emacs knows about LATEX and how to process it, so it comes with a menu full of LATEX operations to click on. If you are editing complex documents with mathematics, there is a mode (AUCTEX) which has even more functionality. LATEX support is well-developed, and there is a hierarchy of newsgroups for Emacs support.

Because Emacs runs on Microsoft Windows, Macs, Linux, and most other platforms, many LATEX users who have multiple machines (and those who have multiple users to support) prefer it to other editors because it provides the same environment regardless of which platform they are using.

It's sometimes criticised for a steep learning curve, but in fact it's no worse in this respect than any other editor, given the power that it provides, and it is significantly better than most which lack many of the authorial tools available in Emacs.

4. ‘GNU's Not Unix (GNU)’ is a project to make a computing environment completely free of restrictions.

2.3.7 Mac editors

Mac users will be disappointed that I haven't included any of the Mac interfaces here. It's simple: I don't have a Mac right now to try them out on. I hope to remedy this for a future edition.

2.4.1 Simple commands

Simple one-word commands like \tableofcontents must be separated from any following text with white-space. This means a normal space, or a newline [linebreak] or a TAB character. For example either of these two forms will work:

\tableofcontents Thanks to Aunt Mabel for all her help 
with this book.
        

\tableofcontents
Thanks to Aunt Mabel for all her help with this book.
        

If you forget the white-space, as in the following example, LATEX will try to read it as a command called \tableofcontentsThanks. There's no such command, of course, so LATEX will complain at you by displaying an error message (see section 4.2.3.2).

\tableofcontentsThanks to Aunt Mabel for all her help 
with this book.
        

LATEX swallows any white-space which follows a command ending in a letter. It does this automatically, so you don't get unwanted extra space in your typeset output, but it does mean that any simple command which ends in a letter and has no arguments (see below) must be followed by white-space before normal text starts again, simply to keep it separate from the text.

2.4.2 Commands with arguments

Many LATEX commands are followed by one or more arguments, a term from the field of Computer Science, meaning information to be acted upon. Here are two examples:

\chapter{Poetic Form}
\label{pform}
        

Such arguments always go in {curly braces} like those shown above. Be careful not to confuse the curly braces on your keyboard with round parentheses ( ), square brackets [ ], or angle brackets < >. They are all different and they do different things.

With commands that take arguments you do not need to use extra white-space after the command, because there is an argument following it which will keep it separate from any normal text with follows after that. The following is therefore perfectly correct (although unusual because it's harder to edit: normally you'd leave a blank line between the chapter title or label and the start of the first paragraph).

\chapter{Poetic Form}\label{pform}The shape of poetry 
when written or printed distinguishes it from prose.
	

2.4.3 White-space in LATEX

In LATEX documents, all multiple spaces, newlines (linebreaks), and TAB characters are treated as if they were a single space or newline during typesetting. LATEX does its own spacing and alignment using the instructions you give it, so you have extremely precise control. You are therefore free to use extra white-space in your editor for optical ease and convenience when editing.

The following is therefore exactly equivalent to the example in the preceding section:

\chapter        {Poetic 
          Form}\label
            {pform}

The shape of poetry when written or printed 
distinguishes it from prose.
        

That is, it will get typeset exactly the same. In general, just leave a blank line between paragraphs and a single space between words and sentences. LATEX will take care of the formatting.

2.5.1 Using the special characters

We have already seen (the first paragraph in section 2.4) how to use the backslash to start a command, and curly braces to delimit an argument. The remaining special characters are:

$

Because of the special mathematical meaning LATEX uses for the dollar-sign on its own, if you want to print $35.99 you type \$35.99

%

The comment character makes LATEX ignore the remainder of the line in your document, so you can see it in your editor, but it will never get typeset. For example
Today's price per kilo is £22.70 % get Mike to update this
If you want to print 45% you need to type 45\%

^

The caret sign lets you type \(E=mc^2\) to get E=mc². If you need the circumflex accent on a letter like ê, just type the letter or use the symbolic notation \^e.

&

The ampersand is used in tables to separate columns (see section 6.3). If you want to print AT&T you need to type AT\&T.

_

The underscore lets you type \(r_2\) for r2. If you want to underline text (extremely rare in typesetting) see the last paragraph in section 8.2.3.

˜

The tilde prints as a space, but prevents a linebreak ever occurring at that point. It's often used between a person's initials and their surname, eg Prof D.E.~Knuth

#

If you want a hash mark (the octothorpe or American number or ‘pound’ [weight] sign) you type \#. For a pound (sterling) sign £, now nearly obsolete except in the UK and some of its former dependencies, use your £ key or type \textsterling.

While we're on the subject of money, an unusual but interesting serif-font Euro sign € is got with the \texteuro command from the textcomp package. The standard sans-serif € needs the marvosym package and is done with the \EUR command.⁶

6. The European Commission has specified that everyone use the sans-serif design, even in serif text, but this is amazingly ugly and most designers rightly ignore it.

2.8.1 Specifying size units

Most people in printing and publishing habitually use points and picas and ems. Some designers use cm and mm. Many English-language speakers still use inches. You can specify lengths in LATEX in any of these units, plus some others (see Table 2.1).

The em can cause beginners some puzzlement because it's based on the ‘point size’ of the type, which is itself misleading. The point size refers to the depth of the metal body on which foundry type was cast in the days of metal typesetting, not the printed height of the letters themselves. Thus the letter-size of 10pt type in one face can be radically different from 10pt type in another (look at the table in section 8.2, where all the examples are 10pt). An em is the height of the type-body in a specific size, so 1em of 10pt type is 10pt and 1em of 24pt type is 24pt.

Another name for a 1em space is a ‘quad’, and LATEX has a command \quad for leaving exactly that much horizontal space. A special name is given to the 12pt em, a ‘pica’ em, as it has become a fixed measure in its own right.

If you are working with other DTP users, watch out for those who think that Adobe points (bp) are the only ones. The difference is only .27pt per inch, but in 10″ of text (a full page of A4) that's 2.7pt, which is nearly 1mm, enough to be clearly visible if you're trying to align one sample with another.

2.8.2 Hyphenation

LATEX hyphenates automatically according to the language you use (see section 2.8.6). To specify different breakpoints for an individual word, you can insert soft-hyphens (discretionary hyphens, done with \-) wherever you need them, for example:

When in Mexico, we visited Popoca\-tépetl by helicopter.
        

To specify hyphenation points for all occurrences of a word, use the \hyphenation command in your preamble (see the panel ‘The Preamble’ in section 3.4) with one or more words in its argument, separated by spaces. This will even let you break ‘helico-
pter’ correctly. In this command you use normal hyphens, not soft-hyphens.

\hyphenation{helico-pter Popoca-tépetl 
im-mer-sion}
        

If you have frequent hyphenation problems with long, unusual, or technical words, ask an expert about changing the value of \spaceskip, which controls the flexibility of the space between words. This is not something you would normally want to do, as it can change the appearance of your document quite significantly.

If you are using a lot of unbreakable text (see next section and also section 6.6.1) it may also cause justification problems. One possible solution to this is shown in section 9.3.

2.8.3 Unbreakable text

To force LATEX to treat a word as unbreakable, use the \mbox command: \mbox{pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis}.
This may have undesirable results, however, if you change margins or the width of the text: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis...

To tie two words together with an unbreakable space (hard space), use a tilde (~) instead of the space (see the item ‘˜’ in section 2.5.1). This will print as a normal space but LATEX will never break the line at that point. You should make this standard typing practice for things like people's initials followed by their surname, as in Prof. D. E. Knuth: Prof.\ D.~E.~Knuth.

Note that a full point after a lowercase letter is treated as the end of a sentence, and creates more space before the next word. Here, after ‘Prof.’, it's not the end of a sentence, and the backslash-space forces LATEX to insert just an ordinary word-space because it's OK to break the line after ‘Prof.’, whereas it would look wrong to have initials separated with Prof. D.
E. Knuth broken over a line-end.

2.8.4 Dashes

For a long dash — what printers call an ‘em rule’ like this — use three hyphens typed together, like~--- this, and bind them to the preceding word with a tilde to avoid the line being broken before the dash. It's also common to see the dash printed without spaces—like that: the difference is purely æsthetic. Never use a single hyphen for this purpose.

Between digits like page ranges (35–47), it is normal to use the short dash (what printers call an en-rule) which you get by typing two hyphens together, as in 35--47. If you want a minus sign, use math mode (section 2.9).

2.8.5 Justification

The default mode for typesetting is justified (two parallel margins, with word-spacing adjusted automatically for the best optical fit). In justifying, LATEX will never add space between letters, only between words. There is a special package called so (‘space-out’) if you need special effects like letter-spacing, but these are best left to the expert.

There are two commands \raggedright and \raggedleft which set ragged-right (ranged left) and ragged-left (ranged right). Use them inside a group (see the panel ‘Grouping’ in section 8.2.2) to confine their action to a part of your text.

These modes also exist as ‘environments’ (see the last paragraph in section 3.2) called raggedright and raggedleft which are more convenient when applying this formatting to a whole paragraph or more, like this one.

\begin{raggedleft} 
These modes also exist as environments called raggedright 
and raggedleft which is more convenient when applying this 
formatting to a whole paragraph or more, like this one.
\end{raggedleft}
        

Ragged setting turns off hyphenation. There is a package ragged2e which retains hyphenation in ragged setting, useful when you have a lot of long words.

2.8.6 Languages

LATEX can typeset in the native manner for several dozen languages. This affects hyphenation, word-spacing, indentation, and the names of the parts of documents used as headings (e.g. Table of Contents).

Most distributions of LATEX come with US English and one or more other languages installed by default, but it is easy to add the babel package and specify any of the supported languages or variants, for example:

\usepackage[frenchb]{babel}
...
\selectlanguage{frenchb}
        

Changing the language with babel automatically changes the names of the structural units and identifiers like ‘Abstract’, ‘Index’, etc. to their translated version. For example, using French as above, chapters will start with ‘Chapitre’.¹⁰

10. Note that the babel package also sets the hyphenation patterns provided your version of LATEX has them precompiled (see the start of your log files for a list). For other languages you need to set the hyphenation separately (outside the scope of this book).