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Here are some fine points of TeXnical typing that novices often overlook.
Do not use the " key to make quotation
marks in LaTeX. When typesetting in
American English, make ``smart
quotes'' by doubling the ` key for
opening quotes and doubling the ' key for closing
quotes. (Of course, if you are typing in some language other
than English, quotation marks may have a different style.
The LaTeX Companion documents LaTeX's babel package that
supports multiple languages.)
LaTeX normally "stretches" spaces after periods, because
it expects periods to end sentences. Therefore, when a period
follows an abbreviation (but
is not the end of a sentence), you need to alert LaTeX not
to stretch the following space. LaTeX interprets a
backslash followed by a space as an unstretchable space, and a
tilde ~ as an unbreakable space. For example, you could
type "Washington Univ.\ is in St.~Louis." (Do not go
overboard with this. It is not good style to use a lot of
abbrevs.)
The proper way to make three dots ... for
ellipsis is to use the LaTeX
control sequence \ldots. You will need to type
\ldots\ if you want a space following the dots.
The ampersand & is a special character, so to get "Texas A&M
University" you will need to type
Texas A\&M University.
Dashes come in three sizes. For an intra-word
hyphen, you type, for example, "semi-algebraic set".
For a punctuation dash, you should type three -
characters: this---for example---is a dash. You use a
short dash with two - characters for page ranges in
bibliographies. For an example showing the importance of
distinguishing between a hyphen and a dash, see the
exercise on truth in advertising. In
American English, one ordinarily leaves no space around a dash;
other languages have different styles.
For consistency of style in LaTeX, remember to put short
formulas--even formulas consisting of a single letter--inside
mathematics delimiters. Type "if \(n\) is an integer",
not "if n is an integer".
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Do you see that x=a and \(x=a\) are different?
\end{document}
Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions.
Usually you can prevent
LaTeX from printing page numbers at the bottom of the page
by putting the command \pagestyle{empty} in the preamble
of your LaTeX source file. (You might want to do this for a
one-page document, for example.) However, \maketitle
overrides the global pagestyle declaration, so you may have to
use \thispagestyle{empty} to disable the page number on
a title page.
The default
LaTeX style does not indent the first line of the first
paragraph following a section heading. You can disable this
feature by putting the declaration
\usepackage{indentfirst} in the preamble of your source
file (between the \documentclass line and the
\begin{document} line).
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | Tips for text |