Most popular Document Classes used in LaTeX are:
| article | For articles in scientific journals, presentations, short reports, program documentation, invitations, ... |
| report | For longer reports containing several chapters, small books, thesis, ... |
| book | For real books. |
| letter | For writing letters. |
| slides | For slides. The class uses big sans serif letters. |
| IEEEtran | For articles with the IEEE Transactions format. |
| beamer | For writing presentations |
Most of the publishers have their own class files which could be downloaded from their websites.
Sectioning is a very important part to the BODY of any report/article. The mark-up commands to divide your report/article into sections are:
| Command | Level |
| \part{.} | 1 |
| \chapter{.} | 2 |
| \section{.} | 3 |
| \subsection{.} | 4 |
| \subsubsection{.} | 5 |
| \paragraph{.} | 6 |
| \subparagraph{.} | 7 |
Level here means the level of precedence. A part contains multiple chapters, a chapter might have multiple sections and so-on.
LaTeX compiler ignores the extra spaces and treats them as a single space. For instance typing:
"This is my first LaTeX file"
will generate
"This is my first LaTeX file".
In case you want to force spacing between words, '~' could be used. e.g.:
"This is my ~~~ first LaTeX file"
will generate
"This is my first LaTeX file".
The basic structure of a .tex file is as follows:
Preamble
Front Matter
Body
Back Matter
\begin{environment_name}
...
\end{environment_name}
\documentclass{.}
\begin{document}
....
\end{document}
There are some special characters which have a particular meaning to the compiler. They cannot be used directly while writing .tex file as it would confuse the compiler. Here are those symbols:
#, $, %, &, ~, _, ^, \, {, }
In order to use these special printing characters, a '\' is required before them
\#, \$, \%, \&, \~, \_, \^, \backslash, \{, \}
'\' cannot be put before '\' to print '\' in the output file because '\\' again has a special meaning (newline)
