More on LaTeX : History and Motivation

LaTeX is a highly efficient document preparation system developed by Leslie Lamport. It all started when the legendary author Donald Knuth was writing the second volume of The Art of Computer Programming. The lack of a good type-setting system led him to develop Tex and release it as free software. LaTeX can be thought of as a Tex extension intended for UNIX systems. Like Tex, LaTeX is also free software, released under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL).

Why use LaTeX ?

One of the main advantages is that it helps typeset documents beautifully, especially technical documents:
Mathematical formulas can easily be constructed using certain commands.

1. Being a programming language, a user can easily modify its default behaviour.
2. The availability of professionally crafted inbuilt layouts make a document really look as if printed.
3. Documents in PS, PDF formats can be easily generated.

 
 Classes and Packages:

Like the Linux mechanism of extending kernel features with modules, LaTeX provides classes and packages for extending behaviour. A class is used to modify a document style. Beamer is one of the most popular LaTeX classes for creating presentations. Prosper is another widely used presentation-making class.

Packages can be added and used inside a document class. A package is used to provide some additional functionality to an existing document. For example, if we need to insert a picture, we have to include the graphics package. For a document, there can only be a single class, but many packages can be used inside a class. Some commonly used packages are:

• amsmath — Mathematical formula formatting — \usepackage{amsmath}
• graphics — Handling imported images — \usepackage{graphicx}
• fancyhdr — Used to insert custom headers — \usepackage{fancyhdr}
• makeidx — Used to build an index for a document — \usepackage{makeidx}
• fontenc: Handling font encodings — \usepackage[encoding]{fontenc}