LaTeX is acomputer program used for making articles, books and mathformulas look good. LaTeX is well-suited for expressing mathematical formulas on electronic devices in a more human readable format, by showing them in a way similar to how they would be written by hand.
LaTeX is used for making mathematical formulas for some articles onWikipedia, in addition to being used within academic circles.
The writer types their article into a plain text document. A plain text document cannot havestyled text, likebold oritalic. When the writer wants to write styled text, they use special LaTeX commands that start with a backslash (\). For example, the command for bold text is\textbf{This text is bold}.
After the writer is finished writing the article, they tell LaTeX toread the document. After LaTeX is done, LaTeX makes a file that can be printed. The command\textbf{This text is bold} would print asThis text is bold.
LaTeX was first made in the early 1980s byLeslie Lamport atSRI International, who published its first manual in 1986.[1] The current version is LaTeX2e (styled), which has been active since 1994.[2]
The example below shows the LaTeX input and its corresponding output:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}\usepackage{amsmath}\title{\LaTeX}\date{}\begin{document}\maketitle\LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for the\TeX{} typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies, and much more.\LaTeX{} was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport and has become the dominant method for using\TeX; few people write in plain\TeX{} anymore. The current version is\LaTeXe.% This is a comment; it will not be shown in the final output.% The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX:\begin{align} E&= mc^2\\ m&=\frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}\end{align}\end{document}
