Lamport L. - Test File (1984)

Test File
Based on Obsolete 13 December 1983 Version of

LATEX Manual
Leslie Lamport
Created 7 July 1984

Run March 4, 2005
Copyright 1984
c
Preface
This is still a preliminary version of the LATEX manual. In the final version,
this preface will thank those who have helped me. The people who have helped
me so far, by their comments on an earlier version or by their help in get-
ting LATEX running, are: Todd Allen, Robert Amsler, David Bacon, Stephen
Barnard, Daniel Brotsky, David Fuchs, Richard Furuta, Andrew Hanson, Arthur
Keller, Donald E. Knuth, Kenneth Laws, Tim Morgan, Mark Moriconi, Oren
Patashnik, Martin Reges, Lynn Ruggles, Michael Spivak, and Gio Wiederhold.
(Please let me know if your name was inadvertently omitted from this list.)
You can join this select list by giving me your comments and suggestions on the
following topics.
• This manual. Let me know about any errors, omissions, or things that
aren’t clear.
• LATEX itself. People obviously will complain about bugs, but I’d also like
to know about anomalies such as poor page breaking, and about anything
else that LATEX does or doesn’t do which you find surprising.
To all you early users of LATEX, good luck. Those who come after you will
appreciate your efforts.
Menlo Park
December 1983
iii
Contents
Preface iii
Introduction 1
1 Getting Started 4
1.1 Preparing an Input File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Starting and Ending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Typing Simple Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4.1 Command Names and Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4.2 The Taxonomy of Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.5 Modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.6 Getting Fancier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.7 Running LATEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.8 Some Words of Advice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2 The Basics 29
2.1 Changing the Typeface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.1 Specifying the Type Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.2 Specifying the Type Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.1.3 Accents and Special Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2 Paragraph-Making Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2.1 Simple Paragraph-Making Environments . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.2.2 List-Making Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.2.3 Centering and “Flushing” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.3 Mathematical Formulas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.3.1 Subscripts and Superscripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3.2 Math Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3.3 Spacing in Math Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.3.4 Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.3.5 Putting One Thing Above Another . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.3.6 Delimiters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
iv
v
2.3.7 Mathematical Miscellany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

2.3.8 Changing Typeface and Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.3.9 What to Do When Nothing Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.4 Text That Migrates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.4.1 Footnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.4.2 Figures, Tables, and Other Floating Bodies . . . . . . . . 59
2.4.3 Marginal Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.5 Sectioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.5.1 The Sectioning Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.5.2 Table of Contents, Etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.5.3 The Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
2.6 The Title Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3 Doing It Yourself 71
3.1 Defining Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.1.1 Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.1.2 Lengths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.1.3 Counters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.2 Spaces and Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.2.1 Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.2.2 Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.3 Line and Page Breaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.3.1 The \\ Command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.3.2 Line Breaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.3.3 Page Breaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.4 Formatting it Yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.4.1 The tabbing Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
3.4.2 The tabular and array Environments . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.4.3 The picture Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
3.4.4 The list Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
3.4.5 Verbatim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.5 Changing the Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.5.1 The Page Layout and Document Style . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.5.2 Page Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
3.5.3 Style Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.6 Using Raw TEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4 Two-Column Text 120
5 Getting Bigger 122

5.1 Doing it in Parts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
5.2 Index and Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
5.3 Cross References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.4 Bibliographies and Citations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
vi
5.5 Auxiliary Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

5.6 Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
6 Errors 134
6.1 About Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
6.2 LATEX’s Error Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
6.3 TEX’s Error Messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
6.4 LATEX Warnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
6.5 TEX Warnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
A Document Styles 144
B The Bibliography Database 145
C Making Slides 146

List of Figures
1.1 The file myfile.tex. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.1 A Sample Figure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

2.2 The first half of a two-in-one figure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.3 The second half of a two-in-one figure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1 A grand example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

3.2 Input for a Grand Example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
3.3 Points and their coordinates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
3.4 \put (1.4,2.6){\line(3,-1){4.8}} . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
vii
List of Tables
2.1 Accents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2 Foreign Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.3 Variant Greek letters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.4 Binary Operation Symbols. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.5 Relation Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.6 Arrow Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.7 Miscellaneous Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.8 Variable-sized Symbols. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.9 “Log-like” Functions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.10 Math Mode Accents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.11 Delimiters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
viii
Introduction
LATEX is a computer program for generating many kinds of printed documents.

You type in your text and some commands to say how you want it formatted,
and LATEX does the rest. For example, typing
\chapter{Getting Started}
produced the chapter heading on page 4, complete with chapter number, and
the table of contents entry on page iv. Even the page references in the preceding
sentence were generated by LATEX; as I’m typing this, I don’t know on what
page things will appear.1 Of course, LATEX also does the obvious things, like
deciding where to start a new line or a new page.
LATEX is a version of Donald Knuth’s TEX typesetting system, but it is much
easier to use than the standard version of TEX. This manual tells you everything
you need to know to generate most documents; no prior knowledge of TEX is
required.
The first thing you probably want to know about LATEX is how it’s pro-
nounced. I won’t tell you because I believe that pronunciation should be deter-
mined by usage rather than fiat. TEX is usually pronounced teck, so lah-teck,
lah-teck, and lay-teck are logical choices. Since logic doesn’t have much to do
with such things, lay-tecks is also a possibility. However, pronouncing it as
“L. A. TEX” is definitely frowned upon.
LATEX was inspired by Brian Reid’s Scribe system While many ideas were
stolen directly from Scribe, LATEX does not attempt to emulate Scribe. A pri-
mary goal of a document preparation system like Scribe or LATEX is to separate
the specification of the document’s logical structure from the specification of
how it is to be printed. I typed \chapter{Getting Started} to specify the be-
ginning of a new chapter, a chapter being a logical component of the document.
LATEX decided how this logical structure is to be translated onto the printed
page—i.e., by starting a new page, printing a chapter number followed by the
chapter name in large type, etc.
1 And I produced this footnote by typing
... will appear.\footnote {And I produced this footnote by ... }
1
You tell LATEX how it should print things like chapter headings by specifying
the document style. LATEX provides several standard document styles for you to
choose from. You can easily change some aspects of the document style, such
as producing a larger indentation at the beginning of a paragraph, or using
Roman instead of Arabic numerals in the chapter number. Using the standard
document styles with suitable modifications, most people will like the way LATEX
typesets their papers, reports and books.
There will always be special cases that no standard document style can
handle. For example, the standard LATEX document styles aren’t well suited for
typesetting the Old Testament. Fortunately, you can design your own document
style. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to do; you have to know a lot about TEX,
and you have to read the LATEX Document-Style Designer’s Guide, which has
not yet been written. I expect there to be a few hardy souls who design new
document styles and make them available to other LATEX users. A document
style created for typesetting the Old Testament can be used by someone else to
typeset the New Testament. However, most users will be happy with document
styles designed by others.
A document style tells LATEX how to print logical structures like chapters
and enumerated lists. However, no document style can know about all possible
logical structures. A recipe is a logical component of a cookbook, but none of the
standard document styles knows about recipes. There’s no \recipe command
that’s analogous to the \chapter command; you have to tell LATEX how to print
your recipe. LATEX has commands for specifying exactly how something is to
be printed—what type style to use for the list of ingredients, how to number
the cooking steps, etc. You can even define your own \recipe command.
While LATEX provides simple commands for typesetting things the way you
want them, these commands are not as powerful as the more complicated ones
provided by TEX. Since LATEX is a version of TEX, you can use almost all the
ordinary TEX commands in LATEX. So, if you find yourself trying to do something
that you can’t in LATEX, you can read The TEXbook by Donald Knuth to learn
how to use the ordinary version of TEX.
TEX was designed especially for typesetting mathematics, and it has many
powerful commands for producing complicated mathematical formulas. If your
documents contain only a few formulas, you’ll be able to get by with the LATEX
commands and a little fudging. If they contain many formulas, then you’ll
probably want to read the parts of The TEXbook that talk about typesetting
mathematics. If you are a mathematician, or a mathematician’s typesetter, you
should find out about AMS-TEX, a version of TEX specially made for mathe-
maticians. There will also be a version called LAMS-TEX that combines the
features of LATEX and AMS-TEX.
Producing a document with LATEX is a lot different from typing it directly.
Your input file is filled with lots of funny commands, and you can’t see exactly
what the printed output will look like. Various document-production programs
2
have been developed that are a lot easier to use—programs that show you on
the screen what your document will look like when it’s printed. These are
sometimes called “what you see is what you get” formatting systems, so I’ll
call them “WYSIWYG systems”. If these WYSIWYG programs are so easy to
use, why did Knuth bother to implement TEX, and why did I compound the
foolishness by implementing LATEX on top of it?
There are two reasons why someone should use LATEX instead of a WYSI-
WYG program. The first is that it produces better quality output. The quality
of typesetting done by TEX is comparable to that of a book publisher, so your
LATEX output will look as good as an ordinary typeset book or journal. This is
not true of any WYSIWYG system that I know about.
The second and more important reason for using LATEX is the enormous flex-
ibility that it provides. In the words of Brian Reid, these WYSIWYG systems
are “what you see is all you’ve got” formatters. They can produce exactly what
you see on your screen, but that’s all they can do. With LATEX, by changing
a few declarations, you can completely change the appearance of your docu-
ment. The same text may appear first in a short note, then as a chapter of a
final report, and again as a journal article. Each time, it should be formatted
differently. Even if your document will be printed only once, you may change
your mind about how you want it formatted. With a WYSIWYG program,
you’d have to reformat it yourself each time. With LATEX, you just change
some declarations.
When casually reading this manual, it may seem like the names “TEX” and
“LATEX” have been used interchangeably. However, the careful reader will note
that I have tried to distinguish between standard TEX and those features pro-
vided by LATEX. This distinction is important only when you read The TEXbook,
where you will learn that most of the LATEX commands you have grown to know
and love are not part of standard TEX.
Before telling you how to use LATEX, I need to tell you how to use this
manual. Chapter 1 tells you everything you have to know to start using LATEX.
You should read it very carefully, and finish reading it before doing anything
else. The rest of the manual is a reference book; you can turn to it when you
come to something that you don’t know how to do. Chapter 1 tells you how to
find what you need.
3
Chapter 1
Getting Started
1.1 Preparing an Input File

Your input to LATEX is a text file. On most computers, file names have two
parts separated by a period, like always.iys. The first part of your input file’s
name can be anything, but the second part should be tex. I’ll use myfile.tex
as my standard example input-file name, but you can use any name you like.
I assume that you know how to prepare a file with a text editor, so I’ll
just tell you what should go into the manuscript file, not how to get it there.
First, however, I’ll mention some important things about text files that you may
not be aware of. A text file is a string of characters. There are two kinds of
characters, printing and nonprinting ones. The printing characters are all those
characters like q , % or = that light up phosphors on the screen, or put ink on
the paper when the file is printed. All the rest are nonprinting characters. The
nonprinting characters are just as real as the printing ones, and it’s important
to know about them.
When you look at a text file, it appears to be a series of lines composed
of characters and horizontal spaces, the characters usually being grouped into
words. The lines and spaces are actually produced by certain nonprinting char-
acters that are in the file. The spaces between words are most often the result
of space characters that are put into the file when you hit the space bar on
your keyboard. In this manual, I’ll usually denote space characters by blank
spaces, just like they appear on your terminal’s screen. However, when I want
to emphasize that there’s a space character present in the input file, I’ll use
the symbol to denote that character. Unlike an ordinary character such as
q , it’s often hard to tell whether you’ve typed one or two space characters.
Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about that. LATEX treats any number of
consecutive characters just the same as a single one.
There’s another key on your terminal that produces empty space on the
4
CHAPTER 1. GETTING STARTED 5
screen or printed page: the tab key. Hitting this key enters a nonprinting
character called tab that acts like one or more space characters. LATEX treats a
tab character exactly the same as a character. Since one is the same as
several to LATEX, you never have to worry about whether that blank space on
your screen is caused by a tab character or some characters. I usually won’t
mention the tab character, but everything I say about will apply to tab as
well.
Your file is broken into a series of lines by a nonprinting character called

carriage return that appears between the lines. I will use as the name for

this carriage return character.1 The characters were probably entered in your
file by hitting the key marked return on your terminal. Just like a q or a ,

a is a full-fledged character. Most of the time, TEX treats a as if it were
a , but you’ll see that there are cases when this isn’t true.
There’s one other nonprinting character that you might find in your file:
the new-page character, sometimes called Control-L. If your text editor has a
command for starting a new page, it probably works by putting a new-page
character in the file. TEX treats a new-page character as if it were a blank line.
Text files can also contain some weird nonprinting characters, like the one
that makes your terminal beep. Those characters don’t belong there; TEX
will come to a grinding halt if it finds one. Fortunately, it’s hard to get such
characters into your file, so you needn’t worry about them.
There are a number of funny printing characters hiding in the corners of your
keyboard that you may find yourself typing for the first time when you prepare
LATEX input. First and foremost is the \ character (pronounced “backslash”).
It should not be confused with the more familiar / character, as in 1/2. You’d
better practice typing the \ because you’ll use it a lot. Every LATEX command
begins with a \. In typing the input for this chapter, I’ve used the \ characters
about as often as the letter d.
Your keyboard should have three kinds of bracketing pairs: parentheses (
and ), square brackets [ and ], and curly braces { and }. LATEX makes special
use of the square brackets and curly braces.
There should be three quote characters on your keyboard: ", ’ and ‘. You
can forget about the " (double quote); you won’t need it at all. The ’ is called
“right quote” and the ‘ is called “left quote” for reasons that will soon be
obvious. The ’ is probably in a prominent position on the keyboard, perhaps
over the 7; it may look more like 0 or on your screen. The ‘ is probably
squirreled away in a corner, and may appear on your screen as ` .
Among the printing characters, the following ten play a special role in TEX
and are called special printing characters, or simply special characters.
# $ % & ~ _ ^ \ { }
1 On many computer systems, a carriage return is really two characters—a plain carriage
return and a line feed. This is of no concern, since TEX treats them as a single character.
While you’re perusing your keyboard, it would be a good idea to pick them
out. The first four are everyday symbols that you’re familiar with. The tilde
character ~ is probably hidden at the edge of your keyboard; the caret ^ may
be denoted by a ↑ ; the underscore _ sometimes appears on the screen as a
←. You might want to paint these ten special character keys red because they
are the characters that have a special meaning to TEX. Whenever you put one
of these characters into your file, you’re doing something special.
The remaining printing characters are called the ordinary printing charac-
ters. They are the upper- and lowercase letters, the ten digits 0 . . . 9 and the
following.
. : ; , ? ! " ‘ ’ ( ) [ ] < > - = + / * | @

Note that uppercase and lowercase letters are distinct characters. Don’t confuse
the uppercase letter O (oh) with the digit 0 (zero). Also, don’t confuse the letter
l (the lowercase el ) with the digit 1 (one).
The only characters that should appear in your file are the ordinary and

special printing characters and the nonprinting characters , , tab and new-
page. Some terminals have a variety of keys with strange characters etched
on them. Pressing one of these keys usually issues a command to your editor
without putting the strange character in the file. However, some of them may
put weird characters in your file. TEX does not like such characters and will
either complain bitterly or do strange things if it finds one in an input file. If
your keyboard happens to have a key labeled ≤ , you will be tempted to try
to produce 1 ≤ 2 by typing 1≤2. Don’t, unless you’ve been assured by a local
expert that it works; otherwise, it probably won’t. It’s easy enough to generate
a ≤ with ordinary LATEX commands.
To get a document formatted properly, you have to tell LATEX what you want.
This involves a lot of typing. Being a fast typist helps, but it’s still quite a chore.
For example, a boldface word like bold is produced by typing {\bf bold},
which means typing six characters besides the four in bold. All these extra
characters can add up to a lot of extra work. Fortunately, a good text editor
like EMACS can be customized to reduce the amount of typing required. In
my own personal version of EMACS, typing a single control character produces
{\bf } and leaves the cursor just before the }. Typing {\bf bold} takes only
two extra keystrokes (the second to move past the }) instead of six. This
special EMACS command, together with a bunch of similar ones, saves me a
lot of work. If you can’t do this with an editor available on your computer, you
should complain.
A good text editor can also help you avoid errors. The easiest error to
make in your input is to leave out a curly brace. TEX expects braces to come
in matched pairs and gets very unhappy when they don’t. With my editor, a
single keystroke generates a pair of braces, so I can’t forget to type the closing
}. There’s also a command that checks the entire file for unmatched braces, in
case I accidentally deleted a single brace. Adding these commands to my editor

eliminated 90% of my TEX errors.
1.2 Starting and Ending

Your input file starts with commands to tell TEX how you want your document
formatted—how wide the text should be, how sections are to be numbered, and
so on. You may eventually want to decide all this yourself, but to start out,
you’ll choose some standard format. The first part of the format is called the
page layout. Your own computer installation will have its own selection of page
layouts, but there should be a standard one called normal. To use it, you begin
your file with the command
\pagelayout{normal}
The \pagelayout command specifies the dimensions of things on the page, such
as the height and width of the text.
The second part of the format that you must specify is called the document
style. It determines such things as how sections are numbered and where figures
are placed. Two standard document styles are report and article. The major
difference between them is that the largest division in the report style is the
chapter, each chapter starting on a new page, while the largest division in the
article style is the section, where a section need not start on a new page. Both
styles have sections, subsections and subsubsections. To choose the article
document style, the second command in your file will be:
\documentstyle{article}
You can, of course, obtain the report style by typing report instead of article.
The \pagelayout and \documentstyle commands are then followed by a
\begin{document}
command. After this comes the actual text of the document. The file ends with
the command
\end{document}
The \begin{document} and \end{document} will make more sense to you later.
For now, just remember that they have to be there, and concentrate on the
important stuff—the text that generates the printed output. So, you just need
to know that your file looks like this:
\pagelayout{normal}
\begin{document}
... your text goes here ...
\end{document}
1.3 Typing Simple Text

Producing simple text is easy; you can pretty much type what comes naturally.
The rest is done for you. For example, the preceding two sentences were obtained
by typing
Producing simple text is easy; you can
pretty much type what
comes naturally. The rest is done for you.
TEX ignored how many spaces I put between words—it treats any number of

consecutive characters like a single . It also considers a to be the same
as a and does its own line breaking.
A new paragraph is begun by leaving one or more blank lines—in other

words, by any sequence of and characters containing at least two
’s. A
new paragraph is normally indented, but the indentation can be suppressed by
typing \noindent at the beginning of the paragraph. Below is a list of other
things that come up frequently in simple text.
Quotes: Double quotes are produced by typing two ‘ characters for the left
quotes and two ’ characters for the right quotes. For example, typing ‘‘quote’’
produces “quote”. You get single quotes, as in ‘single’ by typing single ‘ and
’ characters, as in ‘single’. The observant reader will note that I use the
logical rather than the conventional method of mixing quotation marks and
punctuation, writing “this”, and not “this.” “This”, being my own personal
preference, is not a LATEX policy. You can type
‘‘this’’, or ‘‘that,’’
to produce “this”, or “that,” as you prefer.
Dashes: TEX provides three sizes of dash: -, –, and —. They are produced by
typing one, two, or three - characters, respectively, as in
three sizes of dash: -, --, and ---.
A minus sign, as in 4 − 2 = 2, is not the same as a dash. If you’re using a
minus sign, then you’re writing a mathematical formula and you should refer to
Section 2.3 on page 42.
Space after periods: TEX tries to put a little extra space after a sentence-
ending period, but not after a period that doesn’t end a sentence. However,
TEX is rather simple-minded, and it thinks that a period ends a sentence unless
it follows an upper-case letter. This works most of the time, but look what
happens if you type:
Euclid et al. proved I + I = II. Meanwhile ...
TEX produces
Euclid et al. proved I + I = II. Meanwhile . . .

thinking that the period after al ends a sentence, and the period after II
doesn’t. To force TEX to do the right thing, you should type:
Euclid et al.\ proved ... II\mbox{}. Meanwhile ...
The \ tells TEX to make an ordinary space, and the \mbox{} separates the
upper-case I from the period.
Special characters: All of the ordinary printing characters listed on page 6
produce more or less what you’d expect them to. For example, typing + produces
+, and typing [ produces [ . However, the ten special characters
# $ % & ~ _ ^ \ { }
have special meanings for TEX. The following six can be produced by typing a
\ in front of them:
# $ % & { }
For example, typing \$20 yields $20. The other four special characters are used
so seldom in text that LATEX doesn’t provide such a simple method of generating
them. How to obtain them, as well as a host of other symbols, is explained in
in Sections 2.1.3 and 2.3.2.
Preventing line breaks: TEX produces nice, neat, justified paragraphs from
your ragged input, hyphenating words if necessary. Sometimes it breaks a line
where you don’t want it to. For example, it looks bad if I refer to page 28,
and the line is broken between the “page” and the “28”. You can prevent this
from happening by typing page~28. The ~ acts like a single , except that it
prevents TEX from breaking the line there. Don’t leave a space before or after
the ~ ; it will produce an extra space in the document.
Comments: Sometimes you may want to leave little notes to yourself in the
input file that you don’t want printed. Typing % tells TEX to ignore everything

else on the current line, including the at the end. For example, you might
type
as what’s his name% Look up the name!
showed in 1976.
to produce
as what’s his nameshowed in 1976.
However, the next time you’ll remember that the % causes TEX to ignore the

as well as the text, and you’ll type name % . You’ll also remember this if you
ever want to end a line in your input file without putting space in the output.
Now that you know how to enter ordinary text, you’ll want to structure
your text in units—sections, subsections and subsubsections if you’re using the
article style, or chapters, sections, subsections and subsubsections if you’re
using the report style. I’ve already mentioned that this chapter was begun by
typing the command
\chapter{Getting Started}
and you can probably guess that the following section was begun with
\section{Commands}
The \subsection and \subsubsection commands are similar.
You can find more information about these and other sectioning commands
in Section 2.5 on page 66.
Warning: Don’t try putting any LATEX commands in the name of a chapter or
(sub[sub])section before reading Section 2.5.
There are still a few more things you’d probably like to add, such as a title
page and a table of contents. After finishing this chapter, you’ll be able to
find and read the sections in later chapters that tell you how. Although you’ll
eventually want to do that, you should probably start out the easy way—by
copying from a friend. Given a LATEX input file, it’s pretty simple to figure out
which commands create the title page, and what you have to change to generate
your name instead of his. In fact, the friendly people who install LATEX on your
computer system should also provide some sample input files for you to browse
through.
1.4 Commands
To type fancier text, you have to issue LATEX commands. Before learning about
what the commands do, you should learn their syntax and taxonomy. The
material in this section may seem abstract and unmotivated, but knowing it
will make it easier for you to understand how commands work. Your effort now
will be amply rewarded in a little while.
I will illustrate the general rules by using some specific commands as exam-
ples. Don’t worry about what these commands do; for now we’re just interested
in the syntax. The commands themselves are explained in later chapters.
1.4.1 Command Names and Arguments

A LATEX command begins with the command name, which consists of a \ fol-
lowed by either (i) a string of letters or (ii) a single nonletter. Here are some of
the commands you’ve encountered so far.
\bf \mbox \noindent \begin \$
Another useful command is \today, which causes LATEX to produce today’s

date—that is, the date on which you ran your file through LATEX. Here’s how I
can tell you that this edition of this chapter was generated on March 4, 2005.
Here’s how ... was generated on \today.
Most command names are of the first kind, having of a string of letters.
TEX regards lowercase and uppercase letters as completely different, so \large,
\Large and \LARGE are three different commands. Most LATEX command names
have only lowercase letters; the exceptions are generally like the three “large”
commands, where uppercase letters are used to distinguish otherwise identically-
spelled commands. (As you’ll see in Section 2.1.2, \LARGE is larger than \Large,
which is larger than \large.)
If you write \$one, TEX knows that this is a \$ command followed by the
text one because the only command names having nonletters are two-character
names like \$. However, if you write \todayone , TEX wouldn’t think that this
is the command \today followed by the text one . Instead, it regards it as a
command named \todayone, and since there’s no such command, it will report
an error. You have to tell TEX where a command name ends by putting a
nonletter after it. You can write \today1 or \today one or \today-one, since
1, and - are nonletters.
The most common way to end a command name is with a , so TEX ignores
all spaces following a command name. However, this can cause trouble, since
typing
\today was a sunny day.
produces
March 4, 2005was a sunny day.
Leaving more spaces after the \today won’t help—TEX treats any series of
spaces the same as a single space. You can get TEX to stop ignoring spaces by
typing {}. I can tell you that March 4, 2005 was a sunny day by typing either
of the following:
\today{} was a sunny day
\today {} was a sunny day.
The special character commands like \$ and \# are exceptions to this rule;
spaces are not ignored after these commands. Typing \$ .99 produces $ .99.
Many commands have arguments, which are enclosed in curly braces. For
example, when you type \mbox{xyz}, xyz is the argument of the \mbox com-
mand. Typing \mbox{} gives \mbox a null argument. If a command takes more
than one argument, each one is enclosed by curly braces. \parbox is a command
taking two arguments, so you type
\parbox {2in}{A Parbox}

to give a \parbox command whose first argument is 2in and whose second
argument is A Parbox . Don’t worry about what these commands mean; just
observe the syntax. Spaces after the command name are ignored, but you must
not leave any spaces between arguments.
Some commands have one or more optional arguments, an optional argument
being enclosed in square brackets. The \parbox command has an optional
argument that may appear before the other two, so
\parbox [t]{2in}{A Parbox}
has the optional argument t and with the same two mandatory arguments as
before. The place where an optional argument comes is fixed; for \parbox it
can come only right after the command name. TEX will be very confused if
you try to put it somewhere else, like between the two mandatory arguments.
There should be no space between any two arguments, whether they’re optional
or mandatory.
Some LATEX commands have a variant form indicated by writing a * at the
end of its name. The variant form is also called the *-form. For example, there’s
a \chapter* command that works just like the \chapter command except that
it doesn’t add a chapter number or a table of contents entry.
44
You now know how to write commands in the normal 99 100 % of the cases.
Let’s learn what surprises the other .56% has to offer. Optional arguments
provide two kinds of surprises. Consider a command like \item that has one
optional argument and no mandatory ones, so you can type either \item[foo]
or \item foo. In the first case foo is the argument of the \item command,
and in the second case it is the text that follows the command. Now, what
happens if we want to type an \item command followed by the text [foo]?
If we type \item [foo], TEX ignores the space and considers foo to be the
argument. To prevent this, we must type \item{}[foo] or \item {}[foo].
The {} tells LATEX to stop looking for an optional argument as well as telling
it to stop ignoring spaces.
Now suppose we want to make not foo but [foo] the optional argument of
the \item command, with the square brackets as part of the argument. If we
type \item[[foo]], LATEX will take [foo to be the argument, enclosed by the
first [ and the first ], and it will regard the second ] as part of the text following
the \item[[foo] command. Once again, curly braces come to the rescue. If
we type \item[{[foo]}], then LATEX will interpret {[foo]} as argument; the
extra curly braces will do no harm. This trick must be used whenever there’s a
[ in the text that could be mistaken for the left bracket delimiting an optional
argument.
The *-commands provide a related surprise. Although we think of the * as
part of the command name, TEX actually regards it as an optional argument.
Unlike the ordinary optional arguments that are enclosed by square brackets,
you can leave spaces between the * and the following argument. Thus, any of
the following is acceptable:
\chapter*{Introduction}
\chapter* {Introduction}
\chapter *{Introduction}
If a command with no mandatory arguments has a *-form, then we have

the same problem, and the same solution, as with the \item command. One
such command is \\ . To follow the plain \\ command with a * as part of
the text, we must use a {}—typing \\ {}* instead of \\ * . LATEX would
interpret \\ * as the *-form of the command.
These problems are actually quite rare. Most of the time, you just have to
know the following rules.
• Command names begin with \.
• Spaces following a command name are ignored, except for the special-
character commands like \$ . Use {} to make TEX stop ignoring spaces.
• The variant form of a command has a * at the end of the name.
• Mandatory arguments are enclosed by curly braces {}.
• Optional arguments are enclosed by square brackets [].
• There must be no spaces between arguments.
There are a few minor exceptions to some of these rules, but you’ll hardly notice
them. They are all as benign as the exception to the first rule that you’ve already
encountered: the ~ command.
To avoid rare but unpleasant surprises, you should also remember these
exceptional situations.
• Use {} if a [ can be mistaken for the beginning of an optional argument.
• A ] that’s part of an optional argument must be inside braces.
• Use {} if a * can be mistaken for a variant-command indicator.
There’s one more little thing you might like to know about command argu-
ments. It’s not important, but it can save you a bit of typing. An argument
need not be enclosed in braces if it consists of either a single command name
or a single letter or digit. If the second argument of a \parbox command is the
single command \today, then you can type either of the following:
\parbox {2in}\today
\parbox {2in}{\today}
However, if the argument is \mbox{\today}, then you must use braces because
the \parbox’s argument then consists of a command name plus argument rather
than just a command name.
1.4.2 The Taxonomy of Commands

There are five classes of LATEX commands. Understanding the differences among
these classes will enable you to use the commands properly and will help you
to remember individual commands.
Text-Producing Commands
A text-producing command places a piece of text in the document. The actual
text is usually specified by an argument, as in the \mbox command. There may
be other arguments that specify how the text is to be formatted; the argument
that specifies the text is almost always the last argument. Sometimes, as in the
\today command, there is no text-specifying argument because LATEX decides
what text to insert.
An important subclass of text-producing commands are the space-producing
commands. The “text” they produce consists of blank space, an argument
specifying how much blank space.
Most text-producing commands put their text at the current position in the
document. There are two cases in which the text may appear elsewhere:
• Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page.
• Marginal notes are placed in the margin, like the one on the right. This is an example
Figures and tables may also be moved from where they appear in the input file, of a marginal note.
but they’re not made with text-producing commands.
Environments
Text-producing commands are designed for formatting short pieces of text. To
format a large piece, you use an environment. An environment begins with
a \begin command and ends with a matching \end command. The above
itemized list was produced with an itemize environment, which I typed as
follows.
\begin{itemize}
\item Footnotes appear ...
\item Marginal notes ...
\end{itemize}
The environment is begun with the \begin{itemize} command and is ended
with the \end{itemize}. The stuff between these two commands is not an
argument. Don’t worry now about what goes between the \begin and the \end
commands; just remember that the itemize environment has no arguments.
Some environments do have arguments. These arguments appear as extra
arguments to the \begin command. For example, there’s an array environ-
ment, used to make arrays in mathematical formulas, with a single mandatory
argument. Typing
\begin{array}{llr} ... \end{array}

creates an array environment whose argument is llr . Environment arguments
can be mandatory or optional. Just remember that the environment’s argu-
ments become additional arguments to the \begin, and all the rules given in
Section 1.4.1 apply.
Environments can be nested in the obvious way. For example, figures are
made by the figure environment. To make a figure that contains an itemized
list, you type:
\begin{figure}
... \begin{itemize} ... \end{itemize} ...
\end{figure}
In fact, your entire document is produced by a document environment—that’s
what the \begin{document} and \end{document} commands are for.
Each environment has rules about what other environments may appear in-
side it. For example, the document environment can’t contain another document
environment, so you’ll only have one \begin{document} command in your file.
\begin and \end commands have to come in matched pairs, just like curly
braces. Forgetting an \end is a common error that your text editor should help
you avoid. Mine produces a matching \begin–\end pair with a single command.
A few environments have *-forms. For example, if you’re producing two-
column output, the figure environment makes a figure that’s one-column wide
and the figure* environment makes a two-column-wide figure. To use the
figure* environment, you type
\begin{figure*} ... \end{figure*}
Notice that the * becomes part of the environment name. It does not act like
an optional argument, as in ordinary commands.
Declarations
A declaration is a command that causes TEX to change the way it’s doing things.
For example, the \bf command tells TEX to start using boldface type, as I
just did by typing
... using \bf boldface type, as I just did by ...
Note how TEX typeset everything after the \bf command in boldface.
How did I get TEX to stop using the bold typeface and revert to its normal
typeface? For the answer, you first have to understand the concept of nesting.
As TEX processes your input, it can best be thought of as traveling through the
levels of a subterranean building. TEX starts out at street level. Every time
it encounters a { or a \begin , TEX goes down a flight of stairs to the next
lower level, and every time it encounters a } or an \end it goes up a flight of
stairs to the next higher level. Thus, it remains underground from the time it
hits your \begin{document} command until it reaches the \end{document}.
Every time TEX descends a flight of stairs, it paints on them what led it
down those steps, painting either a { or a \begin command, and covering
over anything that what was previously painted there. When it next ascends
those steps, it must have been directed to do so by the corresponding } or
\end . If it had painted \begin{itemize} on the steps, it can only be directed
up them by an \end{itemize}, not by a } or an \end{figure}. Thus, you
can’t type
\begin{figure} { ... \end{figure} } is wrong!
because the \end{figure} would cause TEX to try walking up a flight of steps
painted with a { .
The braces that enclose an argument are somewhat different from other
braces. In almost all cases, the braces enclosing an argument of a LATEX com-
mand cause TEX to go down a flight of steps to start processing the argument,
and back up the steps when it’s through. So, when TEX encounters the com-
mand \mbox{arg}, it’s at a lower level when processing the arg than it is before
and after the command. As explained in Section 3.1.1, when you define your
own commands, you can choose whether or not the argument braces should
cause TEX to change levels.
A declaration normally stays in effect as long as TEX remains at or below the
current level. As soon as TEX returns to the next higher level, it forever forgets
about the declaration. The region in which a declaration is in effect is called
its scope. We can produce a single bold word by typing {\bf bold} because
the scope of the \bf declaration ends with the right brace. The following input
shows how TEX reacts to a \bf declaration, assuming that it begins when TEX
is producing output in a Roman typeface.
This is Roman.
{Still Roman. \bf Start boldface
\begin{itemize} ... boldface ... \end{itemize}
Still boldface.} Back to Roman. {Still Roman.}
One declaration can be superceded by a countermanding declaration. The
\bf declaration in our example superceded a prior declaration that told TEX
to use a Roman typeface. The \bf declaration can in turn be superceded
by another typeface declaration, such as \it , which tells TEX to use an italic
typeface. Adding an \it command to the previous example gives the following.
This is Roman.
{Still Roman. \bf Start boldface
\begin{itemize} ... boldface. \it Start italic ...
\end{itemize} Back to boldface.} Back to Roman.
{Still Roman.}
Note that the \end{itemize} ends the scope of the \it command, but leaves
TEX within the scope of the \bf .
Any declaration can be used as an environment—you just remove the \ to
get the environment name. For example, you can type
\begin{bf} A bold sentence.\end{bf}
The environment is the scope of the \bf command, so this is equivalent to typing
{\bf A bold sentence.}
You should use the bf environment when one or more paragraph are all in
boldface, since you’ll probably find it hard to keep braces matched properly
when they’re far apart.
Some environments make changes within them that supersede declarations
made outside the environment. These will be mentioned when the environment
is explained.
Some declarations are global, meaning that they remain in effect even when
TEX climbs above its current level. These are generally declarations whose
effects you would not expect to end with the current environment. For example,
page numbering is outside the province of environments and normal scoping, so
a declaration like \pagenumbering{roman}, which causes LATEX to number the
current page i, the next page ii, and so on, is global.
Page-Breaking and Line-Breaking Commands

This is a small class of commands that tell TEX where to end a page or a line,
or where not to end it.
Indirect Commands
This class is a mixed bag of commands that have one thing in common: they
don’t have any direct effect on TEX’s output. For example, Section 2.5 describes
an indirect command for adding a table of contents entry with the current page
number. Executing it has no effect on what is produced during the current
execution—TEX probably generated the table of contents before seeing the com-
mand. However, the next time you run your file through LATEX, the entry will
magically appear in the table of contents.
An indirect command is sometimes placed right in the middle of a paragraph,
usually between words. When this happens, you’re faced with the question of
whether to leave a space on each side of the command, or to attach the command
to one of the two adjoining words. Usually it makes no difference. However,
sometimes you may wind up with an extra space between the words, or, less
often, with no space between them. When that happens, it will be obvious
what you should do to correct the situation. However, by the time you see your
output, you’ll probably have forgotten all about the indirect command and all
you’ll see is the extra space. When that happens, remember to look at the input
to see if there’s an indirect command causing the problem. An extra space is
removed by attaching the command to either of the adjacent words. A missing
space is usually corrected by adding a space before the command.
1.5 Modes
When TEX is processing your input text, it is always in one of three modes:
• Paragraph mode
• Math mode
• Left-to-right mode, called LR mode for short.
TEX changes mode only when it goes up or down a staircase to a different level,
though not all level changes produce mode changes. Mode changes occur only
when entering or leaving an environment, or when TEX is processing the argu-
ment of certain text-producing commands. The description of each environment
and text-producing command describes whether it causes a mode change.
Paragraph mode is the most common; it’s the one TEX is in when processing
ordinary text. In that mode, TEX breaks your text into lines and breaks the
lines into pages. TEX is in math mode when it’s generating a mathematical
formula—you’ll learn about that in Section 2.3. Before getting to LR mode, I
must explain a bit more about how TEX processes text.
As I explained in Section 1.1, the input to TEX is a string of characters.
TEX’s output is a sequence of pages, each page consisting of a sequence of lines
and vertical spaces, and each line consisting of a sequence of characters and
horizontal spaces. To distinguish the printed representation of a character from
the input character, I will call the former a glyph. Thus, the character t in
your input file might generate any one of the following glyphs in the printed
output.
t t t t
In paragraph mode, TEX translates each ordinary printing character into

the corresponding glyph and translates and characters into horizontal
spaces—except when they end a paragraph. TEX regards each string of glyphs
as a word, and it breaks the text into lines of words, with space between them.
If necessary, it will hyphenate words to keep the spaces between them from
getting too large.
Text-producing commands generate glyphs and/or spaces. Typing \today
today (March 4, 2005) produces exactly the same sequence of glyphs and spaces
as typing
March 4, 2005
TEX could start a new line between the day and the year. However, some text-
producing commands produce a box , which is a chunk of text that TEX treats
exactly like a single glyph. One such command is \mbox. Typing
\mbox{no way}
tells TEX to make a box with “no way” inside it. Just looking at the output,
there’s usually no way of knowing that I used an \mbox command instead of
simply typing no way . However, the output is a lot different to TEX. TEX
regards the box produced by a \mbox command as if it were a single glyph, so
the command
\mbox{no way}
produces something that looks to TEX like
no way
There’s no way that TEX can split no way across two different lines, just as
there is no way for it to split the glyph A into two pieces. So, if you want keep
TEX from splitting something across lines, just use the \mbox command to put
it in a box.
Now let’s return to LR mode. The canonical example of when TEX is in
LR mode is while it is processing the argument of an \mbox command. In LR
mode, as in paragraph mode, TEX considers the output that it produces to be
a string of words with spaces between them. However, unlike paragraph mode,
TEX keeps going from right to left; it never starts a new line in LR mode. Even
if you put a hundred words into an \mbox, TEX would keep typesetting them
from left to right inside a single box, and then complain because the resulting
box was too wide to fit on a line.
TEX is in LR mode when it starts making a box with an \mbox command.
You can get it to enter a different mode inside the box—for example, you can
make it enter math mode to put a formula in the box. There are also several
text-producing commands and environments for making a box that put TEX
in paragraph mode. The box made by one of the commands or environments
will be called a parbox, named after \parbox, the exemplar of these commands.
When TEX is in paragraph mode while making a box, it is said to be in inner
paragraph mode. Its normal paragraph mode, which it starts out in, is called
outer paragraph mode. There are some things, like making footnotes, that TEX
can do in outer paragraph mode but not in inner paragraph mode. I’ll warn
you about them as we go along.
While we’re on the subject of boxes, I should mention that sometimes you’ll
want to make a great big box and stick it on its own line. If you leave a blank
line before and after the box, TEX will view it as if it were a one-character
paragraph. However, remember that you must use a \noindent command if
you don’t want the paragraph indentation.
1.6 Getting Fancier

Section 1.3 told you how to produce simple output. Most of the rest of this
manual is about how to produce fancier output. The purpose of this section is
to help you find what you need.
The first place to look for something is in the table of contents. Suppose
you want to write theorems and would like an environment to format them for
you. Scanning through the table of contents quickly reveals that Section 2.2.1
is the place to look. However, you shouldn’t go right there. The information
in this manual is tree-structured. Section 2.2.1 is a subsection of Section 2.2.1,
which is a subsection of Section 2.2. Before reading Section 2.2.1, you should
read the introduction to Section 2.2 and the introduction to Section 2.2.1. The
introduction to a section is everything from the beginning of the section until
the beginning of its first subsection, so the introduction to Section 2.2.1 starts
at the beginning of that section and ends at the beginning of Section 2.2.1.1.
To use a command or environment, you may have to understand other things
about LATEX. I assume that you know everything in this chapter—especially the
material in Section 1.4 and 1.5. When knowledge of other material is required,
I will tell you where to find that material.
The introduction to each section tells you what’s in that section. If you
think you might need a paragraph-making environment, but don’t know what
kind, you should read the introduction to Section 2.2. If the table of contents
doesn’t help, you might can try the index. However, the index is designed to
help you find information about a specific topic like footnotes, not to tell you
what features LATEX provides.
Chapter 2 contains the more elementary commands—the ones you’re likely
to use right away. The environments and commands of this chapter gener-
ally allow LATEX to handle the formatting, under the control of the document
style. Chapter 3 contains commands and environments that allow you to control
exactly how things are formatted, as well as commands for changing document-
style parameters. Chapter 4, which discusses two-column output, should really
be part of Chapter 3. However, I wanted to show you an example of two-column
output, and it’s hard to produce just part of a chapter in that format. Chap-
ter 5 describes commands that you won’t need until you start producing larger
documents. These include commands for splitting your input into several files,
and cross-referencing commands. Finally, Chapter 6 will help you cope when
something goes wrong.
1.7 Running LATEX

You now know how to prepare an input file; it’s time to learn how to run LATEX
on that file. Let’s suppose that you’ve created an input file named myfile.tex,
you’ve checked that there are no unmatched curly braces, and you’re ready to
\pagelayout{normal}
\begin{document}
Look at this \begin{simple} error.
And at this \parbox{nasty} one.
Is there a little town in Wales called

Llegharffysloughlarwaghaurllysgnforghallyl?
\end{document}
Figure 1.1: The file myfile.tex.
run it and see what happens. I’d like to tell you that your file will sail through
LATEX and produce beautiful output, but the chances of that happening on the
first try are rather slim. Your input file will almost certainly contain errors, so
you must be prepared to deal with them.
To give you some idea of what you’ll run into, we’ll try the short input shown
in Figure 1.1. Note that it has two errors: there’s a spurious \begin{simple}
command, and the \parbox command is missing one of its mandatory argu-
ments.
The first thing we must do is start the LATEX program. On my computer, I

do this by typing latex , but you may have to type something else on yours.
It all depends upon what operating system you’re using. LATEX starts by typing
**, which is its way of asking for the name of the input file. Since our file is

named myfile.tex, we respond by typing myfile . LATEX then types out
the following bunch of junk. (It may type something a little different on your
computer.)
This is TeX, Tops-20 Version 1.0 (preloaded format=lplain 84.02.07)
(PS:MYFILE.TEX.4
LaTeX Version 2.0 - Release 7 Feb 84
(PS:<TEX82>NORMAL.PLO.2
Page Layout ’normal’ -- version of 21 Mar 1984.
) (PS:<TEX82>ARTICLE.STY.65
Document Style ’article’. Version 1.0 - released 8 Jun 1984
)
No file myfile.aux.
We needn’t worry about any of this, it’s just LATEX’s way of saying hello.
The first time you run LATEX on your system, it’s a good idea to check that
the version number it types is 2.0. If it isn’t, then the version of LATEX you’re
running is different from the version described in this manual, and you should
ask a local expert if there are any important changes that you should know
about.
The ‘No file myfile.aux’ message appears the first time we run LATEX on
myfile.tex. Afterwards, a file named myfile.aux will appear in our directory.
As explained in Section 5.3, the file myfile.aux is used to implement LATEX’s
automatic cross-referencing feature. Since we’re not doing any cross-referencing,
this file is totally useless. If we don’t delete it, then the next time we run the
file through LATEX, that message will be replaced by:
(PS:MYFILE.AUX.1 )
The next thing that LATEX types is much more important; it’s the error mes-
sage for the spurious \begin{simple} command. Before we look at it, I should
explain the precise relation between LATEX and TEX. Most of the commands
that you use are LATEX commands, which means that they were defined by me
in terms of more primitive TEX commands. LATEX makes some effort to catch
errors, but it won’t catch them all. (It would slow LATEX down too much to do
a lot of error checking.) If LATEX misses an error, TEX will probably catch it.
Unfortunately, it will appear to TEX as an error in one of the TEX commands
that I wrote that implements the LATEX command you typed. Keeping all this
in mind, let’s look at what’s typed out when the \begin{simple} command is
encountered.
LaTeX error. See LaTeX manual for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
! Environment simple undefined.
\@latexerr ...for immediate help.}\errmessage {#1}
\endgroup
l.4 Look at this \begin{simple}
error.
?
The first two lines of this message tell us that we’re in luck—the error was
detected by LATEX before any lower-level TEX errors occurred. The next line,
beginning with the ! , is called the error indication line. It tells us what the
problem is. Section 6.2 gives a list of all LATEX-generated error indications, and
tells you how to find out exactly what caused them. In this case, the problem
is simple—there’s no such environment as simple.
After the error indication line, there is a bunch of stuff that will be quite
meaningless to you and should be ignored. (If you’re curious, you’ll have to
read The TEXbook to find out what it all means.) After it comes a pair of lines
called the error locator, followed by a line containing only a question mark. In
this message, the error locator begins with l.4.
The error locator tells us how much of our input TEX had read when the
error was discovered. The l.4 says that the error was found when processing
the fourth line of our input. Following the l.4, TEX types input line four, split
into two lines. Where the split occurs tells us exactly how far TEX had gotten
when it discovered the error—the first line showing what TEX had read and the
second line showing what it hadn’t. In this case, the error was discovered right
after TEX read the \begin{simple} command. An error locator might consist
of a single line followed by a blank line, meaning that TEX had read everything
on the line before finding the error. The error locator might also be completely
blank, indicating that TEX discovered the error when it was processing a blank
input line.
The final line of the message, the one consisting of the question mark, tells
us that TEX has stopped and is waiting for us to tell it what to do. We’ll accept

LATEX’s offer of help and type H . It responds with the following helpful
message.
Your command was ignored.
Type I <command> <return> to replace it with another command,
or <return> to continue without it.
?
The question mark at the end again tells us that TEX has stopped and
wants us to type something. Since there’s nothing that we want to replace the

\begin{simple} command with, we’ll just type and let LATEX proceed.
The next message we get is caused by the error in the \parbox command.
! Missing number, treated as zero.
<to be read again>
n
<argument> n
asty
\@iparbox ...true $\vcenter \fi \fi \fi {\hsize #2
\@parboxrestore #3}\if@pbo...
l.5 And at this \parbox{nasty} o
ne.
?
The absence of the ‘LaTeX Error’ at the beginning tells us that the error was
detected by TEX instead of LATEX. TEX’s error-handling mechanism doesn’t
know anything about LATEX commands, so we can’t expect much help from the
the error indicator line. Some common TEX error indicators and their causes
are listed in Section 6.3, so you can try looking there for help. You can also

type H and see what advice TEX gives you, but most of the time it won’t be
too helpful. Right now, let’s see what we can discover by ourselves.
As usual, we can ignore everything between the error indicator and the error
locator. The error locator tells us that the error was detected right after TEX
read the o that followed the \parbox command. As this example shows, TEX
can go past the point where the real error is before it discovers that something
is wrong. Fortunately, it didn’t go very far, and we have the incorrect \parbox
command displayed before us. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about
it now.
At this point, you may be tempted to stop LATEX, correct the errors, and
try again. Don’t. You should always let LATEX go as far as it can in your file
before giving up. Whenever you find one error there are probably several more
beyond it, so you should find as many as you can each time you run LATEX. To

let LATEX continue, we type . We then get the following error message.
! Illegal unit of measure (pt inserted).
<to be read again>
n
<argument> n
asty
\@iparbox ...true $\vcenter \fi \fi \fi {\hsize #2
\@parboxrestore #3}\if@pbo...
l.5 And at this \parbox{nasty} o
ne.
?
Once again, this message was generated by TEX rather than LATEX, so we
can ignore everything but the error locator. It tells us that TEX hasn’t gotten
any further; it’s at the same place in our input where it was the last time. TEX
found something else wrong when processing the incorrect \parbox command.

Undaunted, we type and carry on.
TEX next types the following message.
Overfull \hbox (68.3333pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 5--5
[]\tenrm nastyo
\hbox(6.19444+1.94444)x0.0
.\hbox(0.0+0.0)x40.0
.\tenrm n
.\tenrm a
.\tenrm s
.\tenrm t
.etc.
This is a warning message rather than an error message. There’s no question-

mark line, so TEX is still running. The fact that it’s warning us about something
at “lines 5--5” gives us a clue that the problem was probably caused by the
bad \parbox command, and the presence of the word “nasty”, the argument of
that command, in the message confirms our suspicions. TEX is telling us that
our incorrect \parbox command produced some bad-looking output, which isn’t
surprising.
The next thing that TEX types is the following:
[]\tenrm Is there a lit-tle town in Wales called Llegharffys-lough-lar-waghau-r
llysgn-
\hbox(6.94444+1.94444)x340.0, glue set - 1.0

.\hbox(0.0+0.0)x40.0
.\tenrm I
.\tenrm s
.\glue 3.33333 plus 1.66666 minus 1.1111
.\tenrm t
.etc.
This is also a warning—in fact, the same kind of “Overfull \hbox” warning
we saw above. You’ll see a lot of these warnings. They happen when TEX can’t
find a good way to break a paragraph into lines, so it gives up and leaves a line
sticking out in the margin. Section 3.3.2 on page 87 tells you how to deal with
this problem.
Another warning you’re likely to see is an ‘Underfull \vbox’ message. It
occurs when TEX can’t find a good place to start a new page. You needn’t worry
about this warning, but you should check Section 3.3.3 on page 90 if, when you
look at the output, you’re not happy with TEX’s page breaking. Other warning
messages are explained in Chapter 6.
While we’ve been pondering this message, LATEX has continued processing
the input file, printing:
[1] (PS:<TEX82>MYFILE.AUX.2)
TEX typed the [1] right after producing the first page of output. Had there
been a second page, it would have typed [2] immediately after that page was
produced. Of course our tiny file produced only a single page, but you should
pay attention to those numbers when you’re running LATEX; they’ll help you
correlate the error messages on your terminal with the printed output. The
‘(PS:MYFILE.AUX.2)’ can be ignored, but it does tell you that TEX has reached
your \end{document} command and is now finishing up.
TEX’s final words to us are:
Output written on PS:<TEX82>MYFILE.DVI.2 (1 page, 392 bytes).
Transcript written on PS:<TEX82>MYFILE.LST.2.
They tell us that the output was written on a file called myfile.dvi, and
that everything TEX typed out on our terminal plus some additional information
was also written on the file myfile.lst. We didn’t bother writing down all the
error information that was typed because it will be waiting for us on this “.lst”
file.
We’ve finished running LATEX, but we still haven’t seen our output. At
the moment, it’s just sitting on the file myfile.dvi. We have to run some
other program to actually print it. Exactly how this is done depends upon your
particular computer system, so you’ll have to ask a local expert what to do next.
In this example, things went pretty smoothly. Even though there was a
nasty error (the missing \parbox argument), we could get TEX to continue past

it by typing after the two error messages. A single error can easily generate
five or ten error TEX messages. Sometimes TEX gets so confused by an error
that it either won’t go any further, producing error after error with the same
error locator, or else it starts thinking that almost everything is an error. If
that happens, you’ll have to correct the error and rerun TEX in order to get

any further. The best way to stop LATEX after an error is to type I \stop
in response to its question mark. If that just produces another error message,

then you should type X ; this will always cause TEX to quit. TEX will produce
a .dvi file with the output that was generated so far, as well as a .lst file with
all the error messages.
TEX may stop without any error message, simply typing a *. The most likely
cause of this is a missing \end{document} command, but other errors can also

have this result. If it happens, you should type \stop . If that doesn’t work,
you’ll have to stop TEX by whatever means your operating system provides for
halting uncooperative programs.
Even experienced LATEX users are sometimes mystified by an error. When
that happens to you, the most important thing to remember is
DON’T PANIC.
Instead, turn to Chapter 6 to find out what to do.
1.8 Some Words of Advice

A major goal of LATEX is to allow you to change the way your document is
formatted by changing a few declarations without having to change the text
itself. However, no matter how much one tries, changing the format may require
some changes to the text. You can change the width of your lines with a single
declaration, but, if you make the lines too narrow, you may have to change some
things that no longer fit on a single line.
The proper use of LATEX allows you to minimize the number of changes that
have to be made to your text when you reformat it. When you tell LATEX how
to print a recipe, you’ll probably specify how far the list of ingredients should
be indented from the left margin. You could give the distance in inches, but
you might have to change that distance if you changed the line width. A better
method would be to specify the distance as a certain fraction of the line width,
so the same LATEX commands would produce the right indentation regardless
of the line width.
An even better way to avoid having to change the text of your recipes when
changing the format is to define a \recipe command, using the \newcommand
command described in Section 3.1.1. That way, you just have to change the
definition of the \recipe command to change how every recipe is printed; you
never have to change the individual recipes.
Whenever your document contains a special class of objects like recipes, you
should define a command to generate them. This will usually save you a lot
of typing, since you don’t have to repeat the formatting commands every time.
However, even if it doesn’t, you should still define a command to generate these
objects because that makes it easier to change how they are formatted. Defining
a command \hoare so that
\hoare{P}{S}{Q}
produces
{P } S {Q}
doesn’t save any typing. But, if you decide that there should be more space in
the expression, so it looks like
{P } S {Q}
then only the definition of \hoare has to be changed; you don’t have to change
every occurrence of the notation. The experienced LATEX user makes extensive
use of its command-defining features.
Another thing the experienced LATEX user does is avoid wasting his time and
his computer’s time running LATEX over and over again with the same input.
Documents, except for very short ones, are written a little bit at a time. You’ll
naturally want to see LATEX’s output as you produce the input. However, after
you write the first ten pages and get LATEX to print them for you, it’s silly to
keep regenerating those ten pages every time you write some more input. It’s
especially silly to wait while LATEX processes those ten pages again in order to
find the errors in your new input.
You should always run LATEX on new input by itself, without any of the old
input. Only after there are no more errors in the new input should it be added
to the old. If it’s fairly short, then the entire document might be processed by
LATEX every time you add new text. For a larger document, you should use the
methods described in Section 5.1 to avoid this reprocessing.
Chapter 2
The Basics
This chapter describes the basic text-producing commands, environments and

declarations. Most of these commands specify the logical structure of the text
and leave the formatting to LATEX. However, commands for telling LATEX what
typeface to use and how to do some simple formatting, like centering text, are
also included. Remember that, as described in Section 1.4.2, any declaration
can be used as an environment.
2.1 Changing the Typeface

As I explained in Section 1.5, TEX translates an ordinary printing character like
A into a glyph. Whether it’s translated into the glyph A or the glyph A
depends upon the typeface. You specify a typeface by giving the size and the
style. For example, this sentence is printed in 10-point italic. The 10-point is
the size, a point being a unit of length used by printers, and italic is the style.
A typeface is also called a font.
2.1.1 Specifying the Type Style

Below is a list of the type styles available with LATEXand the declarations for
obtaining them. They work like the \bf command for generating boldface,
which you’ve already seen in Section 1.4.2. Note that, like \bf, the type-style
declaration commands all have two-letter names.
\rm: Roman. This is an example of the Roman typeface; it is the typeface

ordinarily used by LATEX.
\it: Italic. This is an example of the italic typeface.
\bf: Boldface. This is an example of the bold typeface.
29
CHAPTER 2. THE BASICS 30
\sl: Slanted. This is an example of the slanted typeface.

\sf: Sans serif. This is an example of the sans serif typeface.
\sc: Small caps. This is an example of the small caps typeface.
\tt: Typewriter. This is an example of the typewriter typeface.
The \rm command may seem useless, since Roman is what you get when you
don’t specify any other typeface. However, you can type {\rm word} to make
just the “word” appear in Roman in the middle of a boldface or italic sentence.
There’s one little trick you should know when using the italic and slanted
fonts in order to produce the finest quality output. Examine closely the word
didn’t , which I produced by typing {\it did}n’t. Notice how the slanting
d of did bumps into the n of n’t . To prevent this, you have to add some
extra space after did . The \/ command adds just the right amount of extra
space. You type {\it did\/}n’t to produce did n’t , which looks much nicer.
It’s a good idea to use the \/ whenever switching back from an italic or slanted
typeface to an upright one like Roman. The one exception is that you shouldn’t
put the \/ right before a period or comma.
Warning: If you use a type-style-changing command in math mode, then the
scope of that command should end before TEX “climbs the stairs” leading it out
of math mode. What this means is that any style-changing command like \bf
in a math formula should always be enclosed in curly braces that lie within the
formula.
2.1.2 Specifying the Type Size

The Normal Type Size
Printers specify type size in points, where 24-point type is twice as big as 12-
point type. The ordinary text of most books is, like this manual, set in 10-point
type. It looks quite normal in a book, but you may find it rather small for your
00
own reports and papers—especially if they’re printed on standard 8 12 × 1100
paper. You might want to consider 11-point or 12-point type, illustrated in the
following two paragraphs.
This paragraph is set in 11-point type. You can get LATEX to set
your entire document in this size type by choosing an 11-point document
style. This is done by specifying the 11pt substyle for the document style
you’ve chosen. For example, you type
\documentstyle{article,11pt}
in place of the ordinary \documentstyle command to get the eleven-
point version of the article style, and similarly for the report style.
Make sure that there are no spaces in the argument.
This paragraph is set in 12-point type. You can get your entire
document set in this type size by choosing the 12pt substyle for the
document style you’ve chosen.
The 11pt and 12pt document substyles may change the line width and other
parameters to produce a more aesthetically pleasing document. You shouldn’t
judge these type sizes by these two paragraphs, since they were produced with
parameters chosen for 10-point type.
Instead of specifying a substyle as part of the same \documentstyle com-
mand, as in
\documentstyle{report,12pt}
you can make it a separate \documentstyle command, writing

\documentstyle{report}
\documentstyle{12pt}
The main style command, in this case report, must come before the substyle
command.
Additional Type Sizes

The document style defines the normal type size. LATEX provides the following
commands for producing text with different type sizes within the document.
Here is what they produce in a 10-point document style; they will usually pro-
duce correspondingly larger type in an 11-point or 12-point document style.
\normalsize: This is an example of the normal type size.
\large: This is an example of the large type size.
\Large: This is an example of the Large type size.
\LARGE: This is an example of the LARGE type size.
\huge: This is a huge type size.

\small: This is an example of the small type size.
\footnotesize: This is an example of the footnotesize type size. It is the type size
normally used in footnotes.
\scriptsize: This is an example of the scriptsize type size. It is the type size normally used
in subscripts and superscripts.
\tiny: This is an example of the tiny type size. It is the smallest type size provided.
Each of these size-changing declarations switches to the Roman type style.

Thus, if TEX is currently using the \normalsize type size, we have:
{\bf normal boldface {\large large Roman}
back to normal boldface }
Because the information needed to generate each typeface takes up valuable

room inside TEX, not all type styles are available in all sizes. Different computer
systems may provide a different selection of typefaces. However, all styles should
be available in the \normalsize, \small and \large sizes. If you request a
typeface that’s not available, LATEX will produce an error with the following
error indication.
! Typeface not available.
Warning: If you want to typeset one or more entire paragraphs in a different

type size, then you must be sure to end the scope of the size-changing declaration
after the blank line that ends the last paragraph in that size. For example, you
should type
\begin{large}
Beginning of large typeface paragraph ...
... end of large typeface paragraph.
\end{large}
Omitting the blank line before the \end{large} command will produce funny-
looking output.
Warning: Don’t issue a size-changing command in math mode. If you want
to use a different type size for an entire mathematical formula, then put the
entire formula in the scope of the size-changing command. If you want part of
a formula to be in a different type size, then use an \mbox in the formula and
put the size-changing command inside the \mbox.
2.1.3 Accents and Special Symbols

Accents
TEX enables you to generate any kind of accent you’re likely to need. Table 2.1
shows how to do it. The letter o is used in the table, but you can replace it
with any other letter. These accents work properly with all the usual type styles
except for the typewriter (\tt) style. They can’t be used in that style.
The letters i and j need special treatment because they should lose their
dots when accented—typing \’{i} produces ı́ . The commands \i and \j
produce a dotless i and j , respectively, so typing \’{\i} gives ı́ .
Type to get Type to get Type to get

\‘{o} ò \={o} ō \t{oo} o o
\’{o} ó \.{o} ȯ \c{o} o̧
\^{o} ô \u{o} ŏ \d{o} o.
\"{o} ö \v{o} ǒ \b{o} o
¯
\~{o} õ \H{o} ő
Table 2.1: Accents.

\oe œ \aa å \l l
\OE Œ \AA Å \L L
\ae æ \o ø \ss ß
\AE Æ \O Ø
Table 2.2: Foreign Symbols
Symbols
Table 2.2 shows how to make some of the special symbols used by Western
languages other than English. These commands can appear in paragraph and
LR modes. However, they won’t work when a typewriter (\tt) type style is in
effect.
There are a large number of mathematical symbols that can be used only in
math mode. These are described in Section 2.3.2. TEX also provides five special
symbols that can be used in any mode:
\dag † \S § \copyright c
\ddag ‡ \P ¶
2.2 Paragraph-Making Environments

This section describes LATEX environments for producing various kinds of para-
graphs, used for quotations, poetry, etc. In all these environments, a blank line
begins a new paragraph. This causes the appropriate amount of interparagraph
vertical space to be inserted. The first line of a paragraph is indented in some
environments, but not in others.
The output generated by a paragraph-making environment starts on a new
line, as does the output that follows the environment. Whether you should leave
blank lines before and after the environment depends upon the logical structure
of the document. Leave a blank line before the \begin command unless the
environment is logically part of the same paragraph as the preceding text; leave
a blank line after the \end command unless it is logically part of the same
paragraph as the following text. LATEX will automatically format the output to
express this logical relationship. For example, it will put a normal paragraph
indentation at the beginning of the following text if and only if there is a blank
line after the environment.
In some paragraph-making environments, like verse, you want to specify
when to end a line and begin a new one. The standard command for telling
LATEX to end a line is \\. Spaces before and after the \\ command have no
effect. See Section 3.3.1 on page 86 for a complete description of this command,
including variants for adjusting the interline spacing and preventing page break-
ing. The \\ command has both a *-form and an optional argument, so remember
the anomalies discussed in Section 1.4.1.
The \\ command separates lines; it is not used after the last line of the
environment. Two successive \\ commands should never appear with no inter-
vening text. To produce get a blank line, you must make a line with invisible
text, as is produced by a \mbox{} command.
A paragraph-making environment can be used only in paragraph mode, and
TEX is in paragraph mode while processing it. Even in the centering and “flush-
ing” environments of Section 2.2.3, in which you normally use the \\ command
to end lines, TEX is in paragraph mode and will break a line for you if it’s too
large. If TEX started in outer paragraph mode, then it’s still in outer paragraph
mode inside the environment. Paragraph-making environments can be nested
within one another, except where explicitly noted otherwise.
Warning: Most of these environments should not be used in a parbox except
in the minipage environment. The only ones that can be used in an ordinary
parbox are the theorem environments of Section 2.2.1 and the centering and
flushing environments of Section 2.2.3,
2.2.1 Simple Paragraph-Making Environments

The following environments are defined in terms of a general list environment
that is described in Section 3.4.4 on page 108. If they don’t do what you want,
the general the list environment will.
Quotations
LATEX provides two standard environments for quotations: the quotation en-
vironment and the quote environment. Here is a sample of a quotation.
This is a quotation. Note that the margins are indented on the
left and the right, the text is justified at both margins, and there is
a paragraph indentation.
Leaving a blank line produces a new paragraph like this one.
It was produced by typing
\begin{quotation}
This is a quotation. Note that ...
... paragraph indentation.
Leaving a blank line produces ...

\end{quotation}
The quote environment is similar, but paragraphs are not indented.
Verse
The verse environment is designed for poetry, though you may find other uses
for it. You can produce a masterpiece like
There is an environment named verse

Whose features some poets will curse.
For instead of making
Them do all line breaking,
It allows them to put too many words on a line when they’d rather
be forced to be terse.
by typing the following input
\begin{verse}
There is an environment
named {\tt verse} \\
Whose features some poets will curse.
For instead of making\\

Them do {\it all\/} line breaking,\\
It allows them to put too many words on a line
when they’d rather be forced to be terse.
\end{verse}
As usual, TEX ignores where you break lines in your input. You tell it to
start a new output by line typing \\ . Since TEX is in paragraph mode, leaving
a blank line starts a new paragraph, which in this case leaves some extra vertical
space and starts a new line. You don’t use a \\ command after a line that
ends a paragraph.
Theorems, Lemmas, Etc.

If you’re writing mathematics, you’ll probably want to include some theorems.
You’d like to type
\begin{theorem}
All theorem numbers are interesting.
\end{theorem}
to produce something like the following.
Theorem 1 All theorem numbers are interesting.
I can’t anticipate the assortment of theorem-like statements that you will

want in your document. You might want lemmas numbered the same as theo-
rems, so Lemma 5 follows Theorem 4, or you might want them numbered sep-
arately. You might want propositions numbered within chapters, or numbered
consecutively from the beginning. In addition to theorems, lemmas and propo-
sitions, you might want to number definitions, axioms, assertions, conjectures,
wild guesses, and so on.
Rather than trying to force some particular style on you, LATEX provides
a \newtheorem command that lets you define your own theorem-like environ-
ments. Suppose you want an environment called guess to produce something
like:
Conjecture 1 All conjectures are interesting.
You define such an environment with the command
\newtheorem{guess}{Conjecture}
This causes your conjectures to be numbered consecutively from the start of the
document. If you want them numbered consecutively within sections, you type
\newtheorem{guess}{Conjecture}[section]
The same input as before then produces the following.
Conjecture 2.2.1 All conjectures are interesting.
This is Conjecture 2.2.1 because it’s the first conjecture in Section 2.2. To
get your conjectures numbered within chapters instead of sections, you’d type:
\newtheorem{guess}{Conjecture}[chapter]
Finally, suppose you want another environment named hunch that is num-
bered the same as the guess environment, but is labeled Hunch rather than
Conjecture. You define this hunch environment by typing:
\newtheorem{hunch}[guess]{Hunch}
The input
\begin{hunch}
Some interesting conjectures are numbered.
\end{hunch}
then produces the following.
Hunch 2.2.2 Some interesting conjectures are numbered.
It is Hunch is number 2.2.2 because it is the first hunch or guess environment

after Conjecture 2.2.1. This is all summarized below.
numbered within

\newtheorem{guess}{Conjecture}[section]
YH
H
environment name H printed label
@R
@
\newtheorem{hunch}[guess]{Hunch}
same numbering as

Remember the discussion in Section 1.4.1 about not letting a [ be confused with
an optional argument.
The numbering of an environment defined with the \newtheorem command
is controlled by a counter having the same name as the environment. Counters
are discussed in Section 3.1.3, which tells you how to change both the values
of individual theorem numbers and the way those numbers are printed—for
example, to get theorems numbered I, II, III, etc.
The \newtheorem command is a global declaration—one whose scope does
not end when TEX “climbs the stairs” to a higher level. You can put the
\newtheorem command anywhere before the environment is used, but it must
come after the \documentstyle command. The natural place for it is before
the \begin{document} command.
2.2.2 List-Making Environments

LATEX provides environments for making three different kinds of lists, which
are described below. Like the simple paragraph-making environments described
above, they are defined using the general list environment of Section 3.4.4 on
page 108. If none of these three list-making environments does what you want,
the generic list environment will.
In all of these environments, each list item including the first is begun with
an \item command. A blank line within an item begins a new paragraph of
that item. Blank lines between items have no effect.
Each item in a list environment is marked with a label. For example, in an
enumerate environment, the label is the item number. The \item command has
a single optional argument, which specifies how the item is to be labeled. If that
argument is missing, then the default label is used—for example, the number in
an enumerate environment. You normally use the default labels in the itemize
and enumerate environments and specify the labels in the description envi-
ronment.
Enumerated Lists
Here are some of the things you should know about enumerated lists.
1. An enumerated list, like this one, is created with the enumerate environ-
ment.
2. Enumerations can be:
(a) Nested within one another, up to four levels deep.

(b) Nested within other paragraph-making environments.
3. Each item of an enumerated list begins with an \item command.
This enumerated list was created by the following input.
\begin{enumerate}
\item An enumerated list, like ...
\item Enumerations can be:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Nested within one another ...
\item Nested within other ...
\end{enumerate}
\item Each item of an ...
\end{enumerate}
The indentation of the input is for clarity only, TEX pays no attention to how
many spaces you type—one space is as good as a hundred. However, it’s a good
idea to format your input like this because it can help you catch missing \end
commands.
The numbering in an enumerate environment is controlled by the
enumerate counter. See Section 3.1.3 to find out how to change its value to
circumvent the default numbering—for example, to begin with item number 7.
Itemized Lists
The itemize environment works the same way as the enumerate environment.
Thus, replacing enumerate by itemize in the example from the preceding sec-
tion yields the following.
• An itemized list, like this one, is created with the itemize environment.
• Itemizations can be:

– Nested within one another, up to four levels deep.
– Nested within other paragraph-making environments.
• Each item in an itemized list begins with an \item command.
Descriptions
The description environment is used to make labeled lists like the following.
Gnat: A very small animal that causes no end of trouble in the North Woods.
It should be avoided at all costs.
Gnu: A very large animal that causes no end of trouble in crossword puzzles.
It should be avoided at all costs.
Armadillo: A medium-sized animal having a medium-sized Texas city named
after it.
This list was created with the following input text.
\begin{description}{Armadillo:}
\item[Gnat:] A very small animal ...
\item[Gnu:] A very large animal ...
\item[Armadillo:] A medium-sized animal ...
\end{description}
Observe how the optional argument of the \item command produces the
label. The description environment has a single mandatory argument, which
should be the widest item label. More precisely, the argument of the environ-
ment should be the same as the argument of the \item command that produces
the widest label. LATEX doesn’t look ahead when processing a description
environment, so it needs the argument to tell it to leave enough space for an
Armadillo: when making the label Gnat: .
The argument of the description environment provides the default label,
which you get if you omit the \item command’s optional argument. Thus, in
the above example, I could have typed \item instead of \item[Armadillo:].
This makes it easy to use the description environment to make itemized lists
with your own choice of tick marks.
TEX is in LR mode when processing the argument of an \item command.
It places the text of the label at the left of a box of the appropriate width. See
Section 3.2.1 to find out how to move the text elsewhere in the box.
2.2.3 Centering and “Flushing”

LATEX allows you to create a paragraph consisting of lines that are
centered
like these two.
You can also create a paragraph with lines that are
flushed right to the
right-hand margin like these
or a with a series of lines that are

flushed left to the
left-hand margin like these.
They are created with the center, flushright, and flushleft environments,
respectively. For example, the last one was produced by typing
\begin{flushleft}
flushed left to the \\ left-hand
margin like these.
\end{flushleft}
As usual, a new line is started with the \\ command.
These three environments can be nested with other paragraph-making envi-
ronments in reasonable ways. For example,
You can put
a flushright environment
inside a quote.
by typing
\begin{quote}
\begin{flushright}
You can put\\ a flushright environment \\
inside a quote.
\end{flushright}
\end{quote}
This is useful because, unlike most of the other paragraph-making environments,
the centering and flushing environments don’t change the margins.
To understand what makes some nestings unreasonable, you need to know
that the \item command does not actually produce the label. Instead, it causes
the label to be attached as an appendage to the first piece of text that follows
it. Thus,
\begin{itemize}
\item The following is reasonable.
\begin{center}
It produces a centered
paragraph within the item.
\end{center}
\item \begin{center}
This is unreasonable. It puts the
item label in a strange place.
\end{center}
\end{itemize}
As with all paragraph-making environments, TEX is in paragraph mode when

processing these environments, so it will break any line that’s too long. The cen-
tering and flushing environments work by making certain magical declarations
to change how TEX makes paragraphs. These declarations are available by them-
selves as the LATEX commands \centering, \raggedleft and \raggedright.
Instead of using the flushright environment, the above example could have
been made using a \raggedleft command as follows.
\begin{quote} \raggedleft
You can put\\ a flushright environment \\
inside a quote.
\end{quote}
Remember the following correspondence between the environments and the dec-
larations:
environment declaration
center ↔ \centering
flushright ↔ \raggedleft
flushleft ↔ \raggedright
These declarations are particularly useful inside parboxes. For example,
\parbox{3in}{\raggedright Suite 123 \\
4567 Ave. of the Armadillos \\
Gnu York, G.Y. }
produces a parbox with three lines moved flush against the left-hand margin of
the box.
You could also use these declarations in ordinary paragraphs, but there is
seldom any need to. Remember that the declarations work by changing the way
TEX forms a paragraph. To have any effect, their scope must include the blank
line that ends the paragraph.
Warning: You can put any of these three environments inside a parbox. How-
ever, if they appear at the beginning or end of the parbox, then they produce
an extra vertical space above or below it, respectively. Section 3.2.1 on page 78
tells you how to insert a negative space to cancel this extra space. However,
most of the time you’ll want the centered or flushed text to fill the entire parbox,
so you can use the declarations instead of the environments.
2.3 Mathematical Formulas

If you type x+y=z in paragraph or LR mode, you get x+y=z . While this
may look acceptable, it doesn’t look nearly as good as the formula x + y = z
that TEX produces in math mode. You want TEX to be in math mode when it’s
generating mathematical formulas.
There are three environments that put TEX in math mode: math, displaymath
and equation. The math environment is for formulas that appear right in the
text, like the expression x2 + y 2 . The displaymath environment is for formulas
that appear on their own line, like
d2 x
φxy =
dx dy
The equation environment is the same as the displaymath environment except
that it adds an equation number:
n
X
z= x2i . (2.1)
i=1
It is equation number 2.1 because it’s the first equation environment in Chap-
ter 2. The report document style numbers equations this way; the article
style numbers them consecutively from the beginning of the document. Other
document styles may number equations differently.
As explained in Section 5.3, I can symbolically label Equation 2.1 by insert-
ing the command \label{eq-sum} in the equation environment, and refer to
Equation 2.1 by typing
and refer to Equation~\ref{eq-sum} by typing
You can replace eq-sum by the label of your choice.
The math environment can be used in both paragraph and LR mode, but
the displaymath and equation environments can be used only in paragraph
mode. The math and displaymath environments are used so often that they
have the following short forms:
$ . . . $ instead of \begin{math} . . . \end{math}
\[ . . . \] instead of
\begin{displaymath} . . . \end{displaymath}
In fact, the math environment is so common that it has an even shorter form:
you can type
$ . . . $ instead of $ . . . $
The shorter forms are easier to type, but they make it easier to forget one
of the delimiters. I recommend letting the size of the formula determine which
form you use, reserving the shorter forms for shorter formulas. For example,
you might type:
$x+y$ and $ 2a + 3b + 4c + 5d + 26z $,
using the regular \begin–\end form for really long formulas.

Most of what goes into a math formula is typed just the way you would
expect. The ordinary printing characters do what you’d expect them to in
math mode. Typing x+1=y-2<0 produces x + 1 = y − 2 < 0 . The ’ character
also does what you’d like it to—typing x’=y’’ produces x0 = y 00 .
TEX ignores all spaces in math mode, so $x+x$ and $x + x$ produce the
same output. Special commands for adding space to a formula are described in
Section 2.3.3 below.
There’s no obvious way to generate some things, like subscripts, because
there’s no natural way to enter them on your terminal. The following subsections
tell you how to do all the fancy formatting that makes mathematical formulas
so much fun.
In a sentence like
Every x in S is also in T .
the letters representing mathematical symbols are printed with a different type-
face from the others. In fact, they are in the same typeface used for letters in
a mathematical formula. To produce such a sentence, you make each of these
letters a separate formula, typing:
Every $x$ in $S$ is also in $T$.
As this example illustrates, spaces following a \) or a closing $ are not
ignored. This is just what you’d expect to happen when typing formulas inside
sentences, and you probably wouldn’t even have noticed if I hadn’t pointed it
out.
A displaymath or equation environment should not start a paragraph nor
form a paragraph by itself, otherwise you’ll get too much space above it. If
this can’t be avoided, the extra space can be removed with the commands of
Section 3.2.1.
Warning: You can’t start a new paragraph inside a mathematical formula.
Therefore, never leave a blank line in any math environment.
2.3.1 Subscripts and Superscripts

To get an expression exp to appear as a subscript, you just type _{exp} . To
get exp to appear as a superscript, you type ^{exp} . (See Section 1.1 for
a discussion of where the special characters _ and ^ may appear on your
keyboard.) For example
You type to get
x^{2y} x2y
x_{3} x3
2
x^{y^{2}} xy
y
x_{1}^{y} x1
That’s all there is to it. TEX handles superscripted superscripts and all of that
stuff in the natural way. It even does the right thing when something has both
a subscript and a superscript.
To save yourself some typing, you can omit the braces if the sub- or super-
script has only a single letter—for example, typing z^2 to get x2 . However,
my customized text editor produces the entire ^{} with a single keystroke, so I
never bother.
2.3.2 Math Symbols

TEX provides almost any mathematical symbol you’re likely to need. The com-
mands for generating them, which are described in this section, can be used
only in math mode.
Producing Greek letters is as easy as π. You just type
... as easy as $\pi$.
You get Π by typing $\Pi$ , and the same convention holds for all the Greek
letters: capitalize the first letter of the name for the upper-case letter. If the
upper-case Greek letter is the same as its Roman equivalent, as in upper-case
alpha, there is no command to generate it. Some Greek letters have variant
forms, as shown in Table 2.3.
Upper-case Greek letters also come in an italic version. To produce Π = Π
you type ${\mit \Pi} = \Pi$ . The \mit command is a special kind of
typeface-changing declaration, which is why you need the curly braces. It is
discussed further in Section 2.3.8.
You can obtain the twenty-six calligraphic symbols A, B, . . . , Z by typing
{\cal A}, {\cal B}, etc. The \cal command is another typeface-changing
declaration. Remember that only these twenty-six upper-case symbols are avail-
able with the \cal typeface.
A few mathematical symbols, like < , can be produced by typing ordinary
printing characters. The rest are obtained with the commands shown in Tables
2.4 through 2.7.
To get you type To get you type

\epsilon σ \sigma
ε \varepsilon ς \varsigma
θ \theta φ \phi
ϑ \vartheta ϕ \varphi
ρ \rho
% \varrho
Table 2.3: Variant Greek letters.
± \pm ∩ \cap ∨ \vee

∓ \mp ∪ \cup ∧ \wedge
\ \setminus ] \uplus ⊕ \oplus
· \cdot u \sqcap \ominus
× \times t \sqcup ⊗ \otimes
∗ \ast / \triangleleft \oslash
? \star . \triangleright \odot
\diamond o \wr † \dagger
◦ \circ \bigcirc ‡ \ddagger
• \bullet 4 \bigtriangleup q \amalg
÷ \div 5 \bigtriangledown \unlhd
\lhd \rhd \unrhd
Table 2.4: Binary Operation Symbols.
≤ \leq ≥ \geq ≡ \equiv

≺ \prec \succ ∼ \sim
\preceq \succeq ' \simeq
\ll \gg \asymp
⊂ \subset ⊃ \supset ≈ \approx
⊆ \subseteq ⊇ \supseteq ∼
= \cong
v \sqsubseteq w \sqsupseteq ./ \bowtie
∈ \in 3 \ni ∝ \propto
` \vdash a \dashv |= \models
.
^ \smile | \mid = \doteq
_ \frown k \parallel ⊥ \perp
6= \neq
Table 2.5: Relation Symbols

← \leftarrow ←− \longleftarrow ↑ \uparrow

⇐ \Leftarrow ⇐= \Longleftarrow ⇑ \Uparrow
→ \rightarrow −→ \longrightarrow ↓ \downarrow
⇒ \Rightarrow =⇒ \Longrightarrow ⇓ \Downarrow
↔ \leftrightarrow ←→ \longleftrightarrow l \updownarrow
⇔ \Leftrightarrow ⇐⇒ \Longleftrightarrow m \Updownarrow
7 → \mapsto 7−→ \longmapsto % \nearrow
←- \hookleftarrow ,→ \hookrightarrow & \searrow
( \leftharpoonup * \rightharpoonup . \swarrow
) \leftharpoondown + \rightharpoondown - \nwarrow
*
) \rightleftharpoons ; \leadsto
Table 2.6: Arrow Symbols
ℵ \aleph 0 \prime ∀ \forall

h̄ \hbar ∅ \emptyset ∃ \exists
ı \imath ∇
√ \nabla ¬ \neg
 \jmath \surd [ \flat
` \ell > \top \ \natural
℘ \wp ⊥ \bot ] \sharp
< \Re k \| ♣ \clubsuit
= \Im 6 \angle ♦ \diamondsuit
∂ \partial 4 \triangle ♥ \heartsuit
∞ \infty \ \backslash ♠ \spadesuit
2 \Box 3 \Diamond
Table 2.7: Miscellaneous Symbols

P X T \ J K
\sum \bigcap \bigodot
Q Y S [ N O
\prod \bigcup \bigotimes
` a F G L M
\coprod \bigsqcup \bigoplus
Z _ ]
R W U
\int \bigvee \biguplus
I ^
H V
\oint \bigwedge
Table 2.8: Variable-sized Symbols.
In addition to making all these symbols, you can also construct others from
them. The \not command puts a 6 through a symbol. For example, typing
\not< produces 6<, and typing \not\subset produces 6⊂ . If the 6 doesn’t
come out in quite the right spot, put one of the spacing commands described in
Section 2.3.3 between the \not and the symbol it’s modifying. You can also put
one symbol above another to form a new symbol, as described in Section 2.3.5
on page 52
TEX provides some symbols whose size depends upon what kind of math
environment they appear in, being bigger in the displaymath and equation
environments than in the ordinary math environment. These symbols are pro-
duced by the commands given in Table 2.8, where both the large and small
versions are shown.
The symbols of Table tab:bigops often have subscript-sized expressions above
and below them, as in
n
X n
Y
log xi = log xi (2.2)
i=1 i=1
These expressions are typed as ordinary subscripts, so Equation 2.2 was gener-
ated by
\begin{equation}
\sum_{i=1}^{n} log x_{i} = log \prod_{i=1}^{n} x_{i}
\end{equation}
However, these subscripts and superscripts are formatted
Pndifferently in an ordi-
nary math environment, where they appear as follows:
Pn i=1 . See Section 2.3.8
to find out how to coerce TEX into producing i=1 in a displaymath or
X n
equation environment, and in an ordinary math environment.
i=1
If you examine Equation 2.2 carefully, you’ll see that I lied. Typing log x_{i}
in a math environment produces logxi because TEX ignores spaces. The com-
\arccos \cos \csc \exp \ker \limsup \min \sinh

\arcsin \cosh \deg \gcd \lg \ln \Pr \sup
\arctan \cot \det \hom \lim \log \sec \tan
\arg \coth \dim \inf \liminf \max \sin \tanh
Table 2.9: “Log-like” Functions.
mands of Section 2.3.3 can be used to add some space and get log x , but that’s
not what I did. Equation 2.2 has log xi , with the “log” in Roman type, the
way it normally appears in math texts. TEX provides a \log command to do
this, so the log xi is produced by typing \log x_{i} . Table 2.9 lists all the
commands for producing “log-like” mathematical functions.
Some log-like function commands act the same as the variable-sized symbols
of Table 2.8 with respect to subscripts. For example, typing
\[ \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} x = 0 \]
produces
lim x = 0
n→∞
Remember that all the commands described in this section

can be used only in math mode.
2.3.3 Spacing in Math Mode

In a math environment, TEX ignores the spaces you type and puts in the spacing
that it thinks best. TEX formats mathematics the way it’s done in mathematics
texts. If you’re not a mathematician, you may find this style rather cramped and
want to add extra space. You could do this with the commands of Section 3.2.1,
but it’s better to use spacing commands designed especially for math formulas.
LATEX provides the following four spacing commands for use in math mode:
\; – a thick space. xx \; x produces xx x .
\: – a medium space. xx \: x produces xx x .
\, – a thin space. xx \, x produces xx x .
\! – a negative thin space. xx \! x produces xxx .
You’ll seldom need a negative space, but it can come in handy.
2.3.4 Arrays
Arrays are produced with the array environment. It has a single mandatory
argument describing the number of columns and the alignment within them.
Each column is specified by a single letter that tells how items in that row
should be positioned: c for centered, l for flushleft, or r for flushright.
Thus, typing
\begin{array}{lclr}
starts a four-column array, with items in the first and third columns flushleft,
items in the second column centered, and items in the fourth column flushright.
The body of the environment is a collection of rows, separated by \\ com-
mands. See Section 3.3.1 on page 86 to find out how to about the \\ command’s
optional argument to put extra space between rows. Within a row, the different
columns’ items are separated by & characters. Thus, the array
a+b+c uvwxyz 13, 479
a+b yz p
a z qqqqq
is produced by typing the following command in math mode:
\begin{array}{lcr}
a + b + c & uvwxyz & 13,479 \\
a+b & yz & p \\
a & z & qqqqq
\end{array}
I typed this so neatly to make it readable; TEX pays no attention to how things
line up in the input.
TEX is in math mode when it processes each array element, so spaces are
ignored. However, don’t leave any spaces in the argument. It goes without
saying that you shouldn’t leave any space between the \begin{array} and its
argument. Note that the \\ commands come between rows, so there’s no \\
after the last row.
Arrays can be nested within one another in the obvious way to produce, for
example, the following is a 2 × 2 array whose top-right and bottom-left elements
are themselves arrays.

b11 b12 b13
a
b21 b22 b23
c11 c12
d
c21 c22
Section 2.3.6 below describes how to make the big parentheses.

An array environment can appear just about anywhere in a formula, in-

cluding in a subscript or superscript. However, its entries produce the same-
sized symbols regardless of where the array appears. In the terminology of
Section 2.3.8, array entries are always produced in text style. That section
describes how to put smaller symbols in the entries.
There are a number of fancy things you can do with arrays by putting other
things in the argument of the array environment. They are described in full
detail in Section 3.4.2 on page 96. I’ll just explain one of them here. Suppose
you want to produce a list of equations like
a + x = 17
ab + xy = 177 (2.3)
abc + xyz = 1776
You can make this with a five-column array, where the second element of each
array is + and the fourth element is = . However, there’s a way to do this as
a three-column array, where the + and = are text items that come between
the columns. To put text between columns, you add an @-expression of the form
@{...} to the array environment’s argument, where the “...” is the desired
text. So, we might type
\begin{equation}
\begin{array}{l@{+}l@{=}r}
a & x & 17 \\
ab & xy & 177 \\
abc & xyz & 1776
\end{array}
\end{equation}
to produce Equation 2.3. This would almost work, except you wouldn’t get
the same spacing. LATEX normally puts a fixed amount of space between the
columns of an array, but it omits the space between two columns when there’s
an @-expression there. Any space that you want there must be part of the
@-expression’s text. The array in Equation 2.3 was produced by
\begin{array}{l@{\;\;+\;\;}l@{\;\;\;=\;\;\;}r} ...
where \; is the math spacing command described in Section 2.3.3. I could use
a math spacing command because TEX is in math mode when processing an
@-expression in the argument of an array environment.
You can use an @-expression to change the amount of space between columns
of an individual array. For small spaces, use the math-mode spacing commands
of Section 2.3.3; for larger spaces use the \s command described in Section 3.2.1
on page 78. You can also change the horizontal space between the columns of
all your arrays by changing the spacing parameter \arraycolsep described in
Section 3.5.3 with the commands of Section 3.1.2.
Warning: Many commands cannot be used inside an @-expression. To be safe,

you should use only the following:
• The math spacing commands of Section 2.3.3.
• The \s command described in Section 3.2.1, commands to produce spe-
cial symbols.
• The \mbox command.
• Simple declarations such as typeface-changing commands.
• Commands you’ve defined yourself in terms of the above. (Section 3.1.1
tells you how to define your own commands.)
As Equation 2.3 shows, the array environment can do more than just gen-
erate matrices; it can be used whenever you need to align things in a formula.
Look at Equation 2.3 again and observe the array is vertically centered in the
equation, so its middle line has the same vertical position on the pages as the
equation number. Similarly, you get
 
a11 a12
A =  a11 a12 
a11 a12
by typing
\[ A = \left( \begin{array}{cc} ...
where the \left( command, which generates the left parenthesis, is described
in Section 2.3.6.
The array environment has an optional one-letter argument that is used to
change its vertical positioning. The argument t specifies that the top line of
the array should line up with the rest of the equation, and b specifies alignment
with the bottom line. Thus, you can produce
y3
t = b (2.4)
x2
by typing
\begin{equation}
\begin{array}[t]{c} ... \end{array}
= \begin{array}[b]{c} ...
Remember that the array environment can be used only in

math mode. There should be no spaces in the mandatory
argument, except within an @-expression. The optional ar-
gument may consist only of the single letter t or b.
2.3.5 Putting One Thing Above Another

One of the trickiest problems in typesetting a complicated formula is getting one
subformula above another. The array environment provides a very powerful
mechanism for doing this in a wide variety of situations. By using the \\
command’s optional argument to change the vertical space between rows (see
Section 3.3.1), the commands of Section 3.2.1 to put horizontal space in an item,
and the commands of Section 2.3.8 to change the type size in the items, you
can get the array environment to solve almost all such alignment problems.
However, TEX provides easier ways to handle certain common cases.
I often build a new symbol by stacking something above an existing one. This
is done with the \stackrel command, as shown by the following examples.
To get you type

αi
−→ \stackrel{\alpha_{i}}{\longrightarrow}
def
= \stackrel{\rm def}{=}
In math formulas, one often wants to put a horizontal line above a symbol
or expression, as in
x2 + y 2
This is done with the \overline command, whose argument is the item to be
overlined, so the above expression is obtained by typing
\[ \overline{ \overline{x}^{2} + \overline{y}^{2} } \]
There’s an analogous \underline command for drawing a line underneath
an expression, text, but it’s not used too often in math formulas. (Unlike
\overline, the \underline command can also be used in paragraph and LR
modes.)
You can also put horizontal braces above or below an expression with the
following commands:
To get you type

z }| {
a+b+c \overbrace{a+b+c}
x+y+z \underbrace{x+y+z}
| {z }
In a displaymath or equation environment, you can put a label on the braces

by using a subscript or superscript. For example you produce
26
z }| {
a + b + ··· + z = α + ··· + ω
| {z }
24
by typing
\hat{a} â \dot{a} ȧ
\check{a} ǎ \ddot{a} ä
\tilde{a} ã \breve{a} ă
\acute{a} á \bar{a} ā
\grave{a} à \vec{a} ~a
Table 2.10: Math Mode Accents.
\[ \overbrace{ ... }^{26} = \underbrace{ ... }_{24} \]

Another instance of putting one symbol above another is the placing of
accents on characters. The accent commands described in Section 2.1.3 are for
ordinary text and cannot be used in math mode. TEX provides the commands
shown in Table 2.10 for putting accents on characters in math mode.
You can put a single \hat or \tilde accent over more than one character
with a \widehat \widetilde command. These commands try to choose an
appropriate-sized accent to fit over their argument, so typing
$ \widehat{1-x} = \widehat{-y} $
produces 1d − x = −y
c . However, these accents won’t grow too wide.
There’s one more thing you should know about accents—how to put one on
an i or j. Typing \hat i produces î , which looks funny because the i has
both a dot and an accent. The command \imath produces a dotless ı , so
typing \hat{\imath} gives ı̂. Similarly, the command \jmath produces a
dotless .
2.3.6 Delimiters
A delimiter in a math formula is something that logically acts like a parenthesis.
For example, in
2(x + y)
|z|
there are three delimiter pairs: the big h. . .i , the (. . .) , and the | . . . | . Ta-
ble 2.11 lists all the delimiter symbols provided by TEX and the input that
generates them.
Table 2.11 tells you what to type to produce the delimiters that are the size
shown. However, delimiters in math formulas need should be big enough to
“fit around” the expressions that they delimit. TEX will produce the right size
delimiter if you precede the input given in Table 2.11 by the command \left
or \right . For example, you get
 
x11 x12

 x21 x22 
 
 y 
z
Input Delimiter Input Delimiter

( ( ) )
[ [ ] ]
\{ { \} }
\lfloor b \rfloor c
\lceil d \rceil e
\langle h \rangle i
/ / \backslash \
| | \| k
\uparrow ↑ \Uparrow ⇑
\downarrow ↓ \Downarrow ⇓
\updownarrow l \Updownarrow m
Table 2.11: Delimiters.
by typing
\begin{displaymath}
\left( \begin{array}{c}
\left| \begin{array} ... \end{array}
\right| \\ ...
\end{array}
\right)
\end{displaymath}
The \left and \right commands must come in pairs, but TEX doesn’t
care what delimiters appear in a matching pair. For example, you can match a
\left( with a \right]—or even with a \right[. Some formulas, such as

y if y > 0
x= (2.5)
z + y otherwise
contain an unmatched delimiter. Since \left and \right commands must come
in pairs, TEX provides a null delimiter denoted by . , so you can put math a
real right or left delimiter with \left. or \right. ,respectively. Equation 2.5
was thus produced by typing
\begin{equation}
x = \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} ... \end{array} \right.
\end{equation}
2.3.7 Mathematical Miscellany

This section describes how to do a bunch of miscellaneous things in math for-
mulas.
Fractions:
Typing 12/17 obviously produces the fraction 12/17. To get 12
17 , you must
type $\frac{12}{17}$ . This doesn’t look very good for in-line formulas, but
you can do marvelous things with \frac in a displaymath environment, such
as
x+y
1
z 3 + a−b
which I produced by typing
\[ \frac{ x+y }{ z^{3} + \frac{1}{a-b} } \]
Roots: The command \sqrt produces the square root of its argument. For
√
example, typing \sqrt{x+y} gives x + y . Other roots are obtained with an
√
optional argument for the \sqrt command. For example, 3 x + y is produced
by typing \sqrt[3]{x+y} .
Ellipsis: Typing ... produces ... , which doesn’t look like much of anything.
To produce an ellipsis mark that looks like . . . , you type \ldots in math mode.
There’s also a \cdots command that produces · · · , where the dots are raised
to the center of the line. If you look closely at the formula
(x1 , . . . , xn ) = X1 + · · · + Xn
you’ll see that the first ellipsis was produced by \ldots and the second by
\cdots; it wouldn’t look right if you did it any other way.
2.3.8 Changing Typeface and Style

TEX uses the following four styles in math mode:
display: Entered at the beginning of a displaymath or equation environment.
text: Entered at the beginning of a math environment.
script: Used for subscripts and superscripts.
scriptscript: Used for further levels further levels of sub- and superscripting,
such as the subscripts of superscripts.
The display math and text math styles are pretty much the same except
for the size of the variable-sized symbols (shown in Table 2.8 on page 2.8) and
the placement of subscripts and superscripts on these symbols and on some of
the “log-like” functions shown in Table 2.9 on page 2.9. (See Section 2.3.2 for
a discussion of these symbols and functions.) The script style uses a smaller
typeface, and the scriptscript style uses a still smaller typeface.
You can force TEX to use a particular style by typing one of the follow-
ing declarations, which have the obvious effect: \displaystyle, \textstyle,
n
\scriptstyle, or \scriptscriptstyle. For example, to produce eΣi=1 x(i)
n
instead of eΣi=1 x(i) , you type
$e^{ \textstyle \Sigma_{i=1}^{n} x(i) }$
instead of $e^{ \Sigma_{i=1}^{n} x(i) }$
At first glance, it looks like TEX uses an ordinary italic typeface in math for-
mulas. However, observe that typing $different$ produces dif f erent, which
looks different from the different produced by typing {\it different} in para-
graph or LR mode. The typeface TEX normally uses in math mode is called
math italic.1
The declarations described in Section 2.1.1 will make TEX switch to one of
the ordinary typefaces when used in math mode. However, some type styles
don’t get smaller as they should when used in a “smaller” style. The Roman
typeface is the only one guaranteed to work right in all styles. Some type styles
might work right in script style but not in scriptscript style, and some might
not work right even in script style. Which type styles work where will depend
upon the version of LATEX in use at your particular computer installation; you’ll
just have to try them and see.
If a command or environment used in math mode puts TEX into paragraph
or LR mode, then TEX reverts to the typeface in use when it entered math
mode. For example, TEX is in LR mode when processing the argument of an
\mbox command. The following shows how this works; it assumes that TEX is
in paragraph mode with a Roman typeface when it begins processing this text.
Roman text
\[ math italic \mbox{Roman \bf bold} math italic \]
Roman
Remember that the argument of the \mbox is processed in LR mode, so it must
not contain any command that can be used only in math mode, unless that
command is in a math environment contained inside the \mbox.
Wrong: \[ ... \mbox{not \alpha or} ... \]
Right: \[ ... \mbox{not $\alpha$ or} ... \]
2.3.9 What to Do When Nothing Works

If your documents contain many formulas, sooner or later you’re going to find
one that you just can’t handle—perhaps something like this:
1 This typeface can be obtained at other times by the \mit declaration, but the only time
you’ll ever do so is to produce italic upper-case Greek letters, as described in Section 2.3.2.
A - B
@
@
@
R ?
@
C
When that happens, you could read The TEXbook to find out what features
TEX provides to solve your problem. If you often find yourself running into such
problems, then you should learn about TEX’s advanced features. However, if
this is just an isolated case, then there’s an easier solution. Instead of regarding
it as a mathematical formula, think of it as a picture whose components are
mathematical formulas. The picture environment, described in Section 3.4.3,
allows you to draw pictures by specifying exactly where each component should
go.
2.4 Text That Migrates

Your input is a sequence of characters, most of which get converted directly into
glyphs—a q that you type producing a q glyph in the output. Most of the
time, these output glyphs appear in the same order as the input characters that
produced them. There are three important situations when this isn’t the case:
footnotes, floating objects like figures and tables, and marginal notes.
Text that migrates is assembled in a parbox—a box that TEX produces in
paragraph mode. That parbox is then moved to the appropriate location. Text
cannot migrate out of a parbox, so migrating text such as a figure doesn’t
belong inside another parbox. Thus, the environments and commands that
produce migrating text can be used only in outer paragraph mode—that is,
when TEX is in paragraph mode but not inside a parbox.2 In particular, none
of the environments and commands described in this section can be nested inside
one another.
2.4.1 Footnotes3
Typing footnotes is a snap with the \footnote command.4 For example, I just
typed
... command.\footnote{This was a snap.} For example...
That’s all you need to know for 98% of your footnotes. The rest of this section
only tells you how to handle the other 2%.
2 There is one exception: a footnote may appear in the minipage environment described in
Section 3.2.2 on page 83. However, such a footnote is not put at the bottom of the page.
3 It’s bad style to use lots of footnotes, but, in a section about footnotes, it’s hard to resist.
4 This was a snap.
A \footnote command to put a footnote at the bottom of the page may

appear only in outer paragraph mode. (In the minipage environment, the foot-
note is put at the bottom of the box produced by the environment.) However,
sometimes you may want to footnote some text that’s not produced in outer
paragraph mode. For example, I footnoted the heading of this section, even
though TEX is in inner paragraph mode when processing the argument of a
sectioning command. I also put a footnote in the following formula, when TEX
was in math mode. 2
y if y interesting5
x=
0 otherwise
Footnote can be put in these places because LATEX allows you to break a
\footnote command into two pieces: a \footnotemark command that puts the
footnote number in the text, and a \footnotetext command that produces the
text to be placed at the bottom of the page. The sequence of two commands
\footnotemark \footnotetext{This goes below.}
is completely equivalent to the single command
\footnote{This goes below.}
The \footnotetext command can come anywhere after the \footnotemark
command, so long as there are no intervening \footnote or \footnotemark
commands. The \footnotetext command must appear in outer paragraph
mode, since it produces migrating text, but the \footnotemark can appear in
any reasonable place. To produce the footnote in the preceding math formula, I
placed a \footnotemark command in the formula, and a \footnotetext com-
mand in the paragraph-mode text that followed the formula. Similarly, I placed
the \footnotemark command in the argument to the \subsection command
that began this section, and put the \footnotetext command afterwards.
Warning: Typing simply
\subsection{Footnotes\footnotemark}
will produce a nasty error. For reasons explained in Section 2.5, you have to
type
\subsection[Footnotes]{Footnotes\footnotemark}
The \footnotetext command produces a footnote having the same num-
ber as the most recent \footnotemark or \footnote command. This poses a
problem if you need to put two or more \footnotemark commands before their
corresponding \footnotetext commands—for example, if you want to put two
footnotes in the same math formula. The best way to solve this problem is with
commands of the form
5 Isn’t this an interesting place for a footnote?
\addtocounter{footnote}{...}
to step the footnote counter, as described in Section 3.1.3 on page 76.
There’s an easier way of solving this problem that requires you to know what
footnote numbers LATEX will produce. The \footnotetext has an optional
argument that allows you to specify the footnote number. For example, typing
\footnotetext[17]{This was produced by ... }
produces the footnote numbered 17 at the bottom of this page.
The optional argument to the \footnote command is always a number.
Even if you’re using a document style in which footnotes are labeled a, b, c,
. . . , you’d still write \footnotetext[17]{...} to produce a footnote labeled
q—the 17th footnote “number”.
The \footnote and \footnotemark commands also have an optional argu-
ment that specifies the footnote number. Thus, you can type
this.\footnote[9]{Why is this footnote number 9?}
to produce this.9 Again, the optional argument is always a number, regardless
of whether footnotes are labeled with numbers, letters or other symbols.
LATEX does a fine job of numbering footnotes, so you’ll probably never have
to use an optional argument for a \footnote or \footnotemark command.
There’s just one exotic situation in which you’ll need these optional arguments,
and that’s if you’re using some strange document style in which footnote num-
bering begins anew on each page—for example if the first footnote on a page
is labeled * , the second one is labeled † , and so on. Printers very rarely
number footnotes in this way because they first typeset the text in convenient-
sized hunks known as galleys, then break up the galleys into pages. At the time
they’d normally typeset the footnote number, they don’t know if it will be the
first or the seventh footnote on its page. TEX has the same problem, but it’s
not as flexible as human typesetters, so it sometimes fouls up the numbering.
When it does, you’ll have to tell it the footnote number by using the optional
arguments. Remember, this happens only if you’re using a strange document
style that numbers footnotes within pages. None of the standard document
styles do that.
2.4.2 Figures, Tables, and Other Floating Bodies

Figures and tables are objects that are not part of the normal text, and are
usually “floated” to a convenient place, like the top of the page. Such objects
are called floats. Special document styles may also contain other kinds of floats,
17 This was produced by \footnotetext[17] {This was produced by ...
9 Why is this footnote number 9?
This is an example of a figure. The text of the figure is produced in a parbox

whose width is the normal text width. Figures will usually contain interesting
things in them like
α $

t t
?
However, you’ll have to look elsewhere in this manual to find out how to produce
them.
Figure 2.1: A Sample Figure.
such as programs or charts. They will work the same as figures and tables, and
won’t be discussed in this manual.
Figures traditionally contain pictorial information, while tables hold tabular
information. However, the primary reason for making something a figure or table
in LATEX is to allow it to float to a convenient place. For example, Figure 1.1
on page 22 consists of a nine-line sample LATEX input file. I put this file into
a picture, rather than putting it in the text, because I wanted to make sure it
wasn’t split between two pages. I could have guaranteed that it all appeared
on the same page by putting it in a parbox (see Section 3.2.2), but this would
have left TEX with no good place for a page break if the parbox happened to
straddle the boundary between two pages. By putting the sample file in a figure,
I allowed LATEX to float it to the best place, so it would stay together and not
mess up the page breaking.
Creating Figures and Tables

LATEX provides a figure environment for making figures and a table environ-
ment for making tables. They both work the same way, so I’ll just describe the
figure environment here.
Figure 2.1 was produced by the following input.
... was produced by
\begin{figure}
\it This is an example of a figure. The text
... manual to find out how to produce them.
\caption{A Sample Figure.}
\end{figure}
the following input.
(See Section 2.1.1 for an explanation of the \it command.)
Observe that you type the figure environment in the middle of the text—
usually right after the first reference to the figure. LATEX will try to put the
v v v v
@
@
Figure 2.2: The first half of a Figure 2.3: The second half of a
two-in-one figure. two-in-one figure.
figure on the same page as the text in which the figure environment appears,
or on the next possible page. The next section describes how LATEX decides
where to put the figure, and how you can influence its decision.
Warning: Notice that in creating Figure 2.1, I left a space before and after
the environment. This is the natural thing to do and it almost always works
right. However, in some rare cases (such as right after an \item command
in a list), this will produce an extra horizontal space. If that happens, you’ll
have to remove the spaces on one side of the environment (it doesn’t matter
which). Sometimes you may even have to remove the space from both sides of
the environment.
The caption is created by the \caption command. It doesn’t matter whether
or not you leave a blank line before the \caption command. LATEX chooses
the figure number and puts the “Figure 2.1” in the caption. Figures are num-
bered within chapters in the report document style, and consecutively from the
beginning in the article style. Tables are numbered similarly, but they have
independent numbers—there can be both a Table 7.1 and a Figure 7.1 in the
same document. Section 5.3 on page 127 explains how to give symbolic names to
figures and tables, allowing you to produce a reference like “Figure 8.5” without
knowing what number LATEX will actually assign to the figure.
Two or more figures can be combined in a single figure environment by
using multiple \caption commands, as shown in Figures 2.2 and 2.3. See Sec-
tion 3.2.2 on page 80 to find out how to put the two figures side by side like
this.
Section 2.5.2 on page 67 tells you how to make a list of figures and list of
tables. (They usually go right after the table of contents.) If may want the
entry in the list of figures to be different from the actual caption, then that
entry is given as an optional argument to the \caption command. Typing
\caption[Gnus Get Going]{The start of the annual ungulate
migration in East Africa.}
makes The start . . . Africa the caption that appears in the figure, and Gnus Get
Going the corresponding entry in the list of figures.
Warning: There are restrictions on what kind of commands can go in the argu-
ment of a \caption command. These restrictions are the same as for the section-
ing commands which are described in Section 2.5.1 on page 66. You should read
that section before placing any commands other than simple typeface-changing
symbol-producing commands in a \caption argument. If the \caption com-
mand has an optional argument, then the restrictions apply only to the optional
argument.
A figure or table may be put on a later page than the place where its envi-
ronments appeared in the input. When you’re using the report document style,
LATEX will not let a figure or table float into the next chapter. The \chapter
command not only starts a new page, but also forces all pending figures and ta-
bles to be printed first. It does this by executing LATEX’s \clearpage command,
which is described in Section 3.3.3.
Changing Where They Go

The fundamental problem in placing floats (figures and tables) is to get each
one close to the text that talks about it. LATEX has a sophisticated float-
placement algorithm that usually does a good job of this, assuming that you
put the environment in with the appropriate text. However, if you’re using lots
of figures and tables, choosing where to put them is an inherently difficult job,
and you may not be satisfied with what LATEX does. To learn how to change
where LATEX places floats, you must first understand its algorithm.
There are four places where LATEX can possibly put a float:
h: Here—at the position in the text where the float environment appears.
t: Top—at the top of a text page.
b: Bottom—at the bottom of a text page.
p: Page of floats—on a separate float page, which is a page containing no text,
only floats.
Each float is initially assigned a placement specifier that specifies in which of
these four locations the float can appear. You can choose the placement specifier
for a float by giving the environment an optional argument consisting of up to
four of the letters h, t, b and p. For example,
\begin{figure}[tp]
specifies that this figure can appear only at the top of a page or on a float
page. If this argument is omitted, the placement specifier is determined by the
document style. The standard report and article document styles use the
default specifier tbp .
Warning: When using the h float-placement option, you must be careful about
exactly where the float environment appears in your input. If it comes in the
middle of a paragraph, then LATEX tries to place the float right after the current
line of text. However, if this line of text is the last line of a paragraph, then
LATEX won’t leave the right amount of vertical space above and below the float.
In that case, you should put the float environment after the current paragraph,
preceded by a blank line. LATEX will also mess up the vertical spacing if you
use the h option to put two floats in a row, without an intervening line of text.
You can fix this up by putting extra (positive or negative) vertical space in the
float with the commands of Section 3.2.1. However, it’s bad style to have two
consecutive figures in the middle of your text.
LATEX always tries to put a float on the earliest possible page, starting with
the current page—that is, the page where the float environment appears. Within
a given text page, its order of preference for where the float should go is htb .
(Of course, the h option is a possibility only on the page where the environment
appears.) The reason a float doesn’t always go on the current page is that LATEX
will never violate the following conditions.
• It never puts more on a page than will fit.

• Floats of a given type are printed in order. Thus, a figure never appears
before another figure that preceded it in the input. However, it may appear
before a preceding table.
• The page’s float-placement constraints must be met. These constraints,
described in detail in Section 3.5.3, specify such style parameters as how
many floats can appear on a page and how much of the page can be taken
up by floats.
If LATEX has to worry about only a single type of float—for example, if you
have figures but not tables in that part of the document—then it will do the
best possible job of printing floats as early as possible while not violating these
conditions. If your document has both figures and tables, you might get LATEX
to do a better job by interchanging the order in which a figure and a table
appear in the input—especially if you have lots of figures and tables. In that
case, there’s probably no very good way to get them all close to the text that
talks about them.
Probably the most effective way to change where LATEX puts your figures and
tables is to change the float-placement constraints. For example, to get all the
floats on the page where you want them, you may have to change the constraints
to allow LATEX to put more floats on a page. Section 3.5.3 on page 115 describes
the float-placement constraints, but you must first read Section 3.1 on page 71
to learn the commands for changing them.
Two-Column Figures and Tables

As described in Section 4, some document styles produce two-column
output—each page having two columns of text. In such a style, everything
in the above discussion holds if you replace “page” by “column”. Thus, the
figure environment produces column-wide figures, which may appear in the
middle of a column, at the top or bottom of the column, or in a separate float
column.
LATEX also provides special commands for producing two-column-wide floats.
A two-column float can appear only at the top of a text page or on a separate
float page that consists only of two-column floats. The *-form of a float envi-
ronment produces a two-column float. Thus, you type
\begin{figure*} ... \end{figure*}
to create a two-column-wide figure. There’s an analogous table* environment.
These environments, like their unstarred counterparts, have an optional argu-
ment that gives the float-placement specifier, but the only meaningful options
are t and p.
The relative ordering among two-column figures is preserved, just as for one-
column figures. However, the relative ordering between different kinds of figures
is not. Thus, a two-column figure may migrate to a later page than a following
one-column figure.
2.4.3 Marginal Notes

Marginal notes are made with the \marginpar command. I can place a note in
the margin adjacent to this line by typing Here is a rather dull
marginal note.
... this line
\marginpar{\it Here is a rather dull marginal note.}
by typing ...
The argument of the \marginpar command is put in a parbox, so TEX is in
inner paragraph mode when processing it.
If a \marginpar command appears in a paragraph, LATEX tries to put the
marginal note adjacent to the line in which the command appears. If the com-
mand is placed between paragraphs, LATEX tries to align the marginal note with
the bottom line of the preceding paragraph. However, it will move a marginal
note down on the page to keep it from bumping into a previous one, producing
the following warning message on your terminal:
LaTeX Warning: marginpar on page ... moved.
You can change the alignment by putting positive and negative vertical spacing
commands in the marginal note. These commands are described in Section 3.2.1
on page 78.
LATEX will not break a marginal note across pages; it’s you’re responsibility
to make sure that the note doesn’t extend below the bottom of the page. This
may require the commands of Section 3.3.3 to tell LATEX where to start a new
page
Marginal notes are not handled efficiently by LATEX, and you shouldn’t use
very many of them. If you have more than two or three on a page, then you’re
asking for trouble.
A page has both a left and a right margin; which one LATEX uses for marginal
notes depends upon the document style. A document style specifies if LATEX
should format its output for the document to be printed on both sides of the
page or on just one side. Books are printed on both sides, while technical reports
and preprints may be printed either on one or two sides. Section 3.5.1 describes
how to specify one-sided or two-sided printing.
If the document style calls for one-sided printing, LATEX normally puts
marginal notes in the right margin. For two-sided printing, it normally uses
the left margin for even-numbered (left-hand) pages and the right margin for
odd-numbered (right-handed) ones. The command \reversemarginpar causes
LATEX to use the opposite margin—for example, the left margin for odd-num-
bered pages in two-sided printing. The \normalmarginpar command restores
LATEX’s normal behavior. These two commands are declarations, with the usual
scoping rules.
Warning: When a marginal note appears in a paragraph, it doesn’t matter
if the note itself is in the scope of a \reversemarginpar declaration; what
counts is whether or not the blank line ending the paragraph is in the scope of
that declaration. Thus, if both a \reversemarginpar and a \normalmarginpar
command appear in the same paragraph, only the last one has any effect.
Warning: If you switch back and forth between normal and reverse positioning
of marginal notes, LATEX may not move a marginal note down to avoid printing
on top of a preceding one. If this happens, it means you’re using too many
marginal notes.
You may want a marginal note to look different if it appears in the left than
if it appears in the right margin. For example, I want the marginal note on
this line to have an arrow pointing to the text. However, as I type this, I don’t ⇐
know in which margin the note will appear, so I don’t know if I should use a
left-pointing or a right-pointing arrow. I can solve this problem by giving an
optional argument to the \marginpar command, typing
... note on this

\marginpar [ \raggedleft $\Rightarrow$ ]{ \raggedright
$\Leftarrow$ } line to have an arrow ...
The optional argument is used if the note appears in the left margin, and the
mandatory argument is used if it appears in the right margin. (Look up the
commands in the index if you want to see exactly what the arguments do.) If
no optional argument is given, the mandatory argument is used in either case.
2.5 Sectioning
2.5.1 The Sectioning Commands
The commands \chapter, \section, and so on for starting a new sectional
unit were introduced in Section 1.3. For simplicity, they are called sectioning
commands. Remember that the \chapter command is not available in the
article document style; the section is the major division in that style.
The sectioning commands have *-forms that print a title, but do not include
a number and do not make a table of contents entry. For example, the command
\subsection*{More Sectioning Commands}
produces the following heading:
More Sectioning Commands

Compare this with the command
\subsection{The Sectioning Commands}
that began this section. This \subsection* command did not produce a table
of contents entry.
In addition to providing the heading in the text, the argument of a sectioning
command can appear in two other places: in the table of contents entry and,
for some document styles, in the running head at the top of the page. For
example, in the the document style I’m using for this book, the arguments of
\chapter and \section commands wind up at the top of a page. You may
not want the same thing to appear in these other two places as appears in the
text heading. For example, the section name may be too long to fit on a single
table-of-contents line. To handle this situation, the sectioning commands have
an optional argument that provides the text for these other two purposes. For
example, typing
\subsubsection [Gnats and Gnus on Gneiss]{Ungulates
and Their Parasites in Metamorphic Rock Ecosystems}
produces the following section heading
Ungulates and Their Parasites in Metamorphic Rock Ecosystems

and uses
Gnats and Gnus on Gneiss
for the table of contents entry, as you can verify by turning to the table of
contents. Since the *-form of the sectioning commands produce only the in-text
heading, they have no optional argument.
There’s another reason why you might need an optional argument for a sec-
tioning command. The in-text title produced by the command is a parbox, and
anything that can be put into an ordinary parbox can go there. However, get-
ting the argument from the sectioning command to the table of contents or page
heading involves a tortuous sequence of TEX operations best left unexplained.
This process will fail, and its failure will produce cryptic error messages, if the
argument contains any but the simplest LATEX commands. The “simple” com-
mands that can be put in the table of contents or page heading include the
following:
• The typeface-changing commands of Section 2.1.
• Commands to generate accents and special symbols—the ordinary ones of
Sections 2.1.3 and 2.1.3 and the ones used in math mode that are described
in Sections 2.3.2 and 2.3.5.
• Simple math formula commands, like the commands for subscripts and
superscripts.
• The \s command for inserting horizontal space. (See Section 3.2.1.)
• The \mbox command. (See Section 3.2.2.)
They do not include the \footnotemark command of Section 2.4.1 or the \label
command of Section 5.3. Thus, to add a footnote to a section heading, you must
to type something like
\section[Armadillos]{Armadillos\footnotemark}
The \footnotemark command can go in the mandatory argument only if there
is an optional argument.
2.5.2 Table of Contents, Etc.

A table of contents is produced a \tableofcontents command. You put the
command right where you want the table of contents to go; LATEX does the rest
for you. It produces a heading, but it does not automatically start a new page.
Section 3.5.3 on page 117 explains how to change the heading.
There are similar commands \listoffigures and \listoftables for pro-
ducing a list of figures and a list of tables, respectively. Everything works exactly
the same as for the table of contents.
When LATEX processes the input file myfile.tex that has a
\tableofcontents command, it produces a file myfile.toc containing com-
mands to generate the table of contents. (Further details on how this is done
are given in Section 5.5.) The \tableofcontents command reads the version
of myfile.toc that was produced the last time you ran LATEX on myfile.tex.
Thus, LATEX always produces the table of contents for the previous version
of your document, and it generates an empty table of contents the first time
around. This is seldom a problem, since you’ll be making many changes to your
document before it’s ready, and the last few rounds of changes will usually be
minor ones that don’t affect the table of contents. However, just to be safe, you
might want to run LATEX over your document twice when producing the final
version.
The list of figures is produced the same way, using the file myfile.lof, and
the list of tables uses myfile.lot. The .toc, .lof and .lot files are called
contents files. Remember that a .toc file is produced only if you include a
\tableofcontents command, and similarly for the other contents files.
If you were to look at the .toc file for this manual, you’d find the following
LATEX commands:
\contentsline{chapter}{...{1.}Getting Started}{4}
\contentsline{section}{...{1.1.}Preparing an Input File}{4}
where the ... are commands for producing the appropriate horizontal spacing.
The first argument of the \contentsline command tells what kind of section
entry it is for—a chapter, section, subsection or subsubsection. The second
argument is the entry, and the third argument is the page number.
If LATEX doesn’t produce the table of contents exactly the way you want it,
a quick and dirty way to fix it is to edit the .toc file yourself. However, don’t
even think of doing this until you’re preparing the last, ultimate, final version
of your document. If you do change the .toc file yourself, you should also add a
\nofiles command, as described in Section 5.5 on page 130, to prevent LATEX
from writing a new .toc file.
LATEX also provides commands for adding things to a contents file file. The
command
\addcontentsline{toc}{subsubsection}{The Wandering Gnus}
adds the command
\contentsline {subsubsection}{The Wandering Gnus}{68}
to the .toc file. You can check this manual’s table of contents to see what
this command produced. The first argument specifies on which contents file the
\contentsline command is to go. The next two arguments are the first two
arguments of the \contentsline command. (LATEX supplies the page number
argument.) You should look at the .lof or .lot file to find out what to put as
the second argument for a list of figures or tables entry.
The command
\addtocontents{toc}{This goes on .toc file}

just writes This goes on .toc file onto the .toc file. The restrictions on
what can be put in the table of contents, described in Section 2.5.1 above, hold
for the \addcontentsline and \addtocontents commands, with one important
exception. This exception allows you to put arbitrary commands in a contents
file. (Without it, the \addtocontents command would be useless.) Putting
\writecommand{\anycommand}
in the argument of an \addcontentsline or \addtocontents command will
put \anycommand on the contents file. For example, to add a footnoted table-
of-contents entry, you’d type
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{ ...
\writecommand{\footnotemark}}
\addtocontents{toc}{\writecommand{\footnotetext}{ ... }}
This will write
\contentsline{section}{ ... \footnotemark}
\footnotetext{ ... }
on the .toc file. Section 2.4.1 explains how this produces the desired footnote.
2.5.3 The Appendix

The appendix is an optional portion of a document that follows the main part
of the text. It has the same sectioning divisions as the main part—for example,
in the report document style, the largest division is the chapter.
The appendix is begun by typing \appendix. This changes the sectioning
commands so they produce the numbering appropriate for an appendix. In the
report document style, the first \chapter command following the \appendix
command produces a chapter labeled “Appendix A”. Its sections are numbered
“A.1”, “A.2”, and so forth. In the article document style, the first section
after the \appendix command is numbered “A”. The \appendix command does
not produce any text, nor does it leave space or start a new page.
2.6 The Title Page

The titlepage environment creates a title page—that is, a page with no printed
page number or heading. It also causes the following page to be numbered page
one. You can put a titlepage environment any place in your document, but
there’s seldom any reason to put it anywhere but at the beginning.
Formatting the title page is left to you. The typeface-changing commands
of Section 2.1, the environments of Section 2.2.3 for centering and “flushing”
text, and the spacing commands of Section 3.2.1 tell you just about everything
you need to get the title page exactly the way you want it. Don’t forget about
the \today command, mentioned in Section 1.4.1, for generating the date. It’s
a good idea to put a date on the title page so someone can tell at a glance what
version he’s reading.
Chapter 3
Doing It Yourself
This chapter describes commands that give you more control over how LATEX
formats your text. With these commands, you can specify exactly what the
output should look like.
3.1 Defining Things

When processing a document, LATEX keeps track of what it’s doing by assigning
meanings to certain commands. Sometimes you have to assign those meanings,
as when you use the commands of Section 2.2.1 to assign a meaning to
\begin{theorem} ... \end{theorem}
This section describes how to define new commands and change the meaning
of old ones, which is one way of changing how LATEX formats your text. There
are several different kinds of commands that are defined in different ways, as
explained below.
3.1.1 Commands
You can save yourself a lot of typing by defining your own commands to serve
as abbreviations. For example, suppose your document contains the expression
α—ω in many places. You can define the control sequence \alom to mean α—ω
by typing
\newcommand{\alom}{$\alpha$---$\omega$}
(See Section 2.3 for an explanation of the the \alpha and \omega commands
and the $’s.) You can then type
The letters \alom are often used.
71
CHAPTER 3. DOING IT YOURSELF 72
to produce
The letters α—ωare often used.
Whoops, remember what you learned in Section 1.4.1 on page 10: TEX gobbles
up the space after a command name. So, you should type \alom{} .
The \newcommand command has an optional argument that lets you define
commands with arguments. Suppose your formulas have lots of expressions of
the form −x2 + y 3 /x for different x and y. You’d want to define a command
\tnp such that \tnp{m}{(n+1)} was equivalent to typing
-m^{2} + (n+1)^{3}/m
This is done with the command
\newcommand{\tnp}[2]{-#1^{2} + #2^{3}/#1}
The optional argument specifies that \tnp should have two arguments. The
expressions #1 and #2 in the definition are replaced by the first and second
arguments when the command is used.
The braces enclosing the last argument of a \newcommand command do not
become part of the definition. If you define
\newcommand{\makebold}[#1]{\bf #1}
then TEX replaces \makebold{bold} by \bf bold, with no braces around it. If
you want \makebold{bold} to mean {\bf bold}, limiting the scope of the \bf
declaration, then you should define \makebold by
\newcommand{\makebold}[#1]{{\bf #1}}
As I explained on page 27 of Section 1.8, definitions not only save you typing,
but they also make it easy to change how things are formatted. For example, if
you decide that there should be more space around the “+” in all those \tnp
expressions, you just change the definition. Had you typed out each formula,
you’d have to go back and change each one individually.
It would be disastrous if you accidentally redefined some ordinary LATEX
command. For example, \topfraction is a parameter LATEX uses in its figure-
placement algorithm. It would be fatal to redefine it to mean something else.
Therefore, \newcommand will produce an error if you try to redefine an existing
command, and will not change the definition. This prevents you from acciden-
tally redefining a LATEX parameter. If you really want to change the definition
of \topfraction, you should use the \renewcommand command. It works ex-
actly the same as \newcommand except that it doesn’t object if the command is
already defined.
Before you try to do anything clever by defining your own commands, you
should know a little more about how they work. When TEX encounters a com-
mand that takes arguments, it looks for that command’s arguments before trying
to interpret any more commands. If you’re a computer programmer who knows

about macro expansion, then you’ll understand why the following restriction
applies. If not, then just remember the restriction.
Never define a command that produces arguments for another com-
mand without producing that other command.
For example, you can’t write
\newcommand{\gnu}{{x}{y}} \tnp\gnu is wrong
because the macro \gnu produces the arguments for the \tnp command, but it
doesn’t generate that command. However, you can write
\newcommand{\gnat}{\tnp{x}} \gnat{y}
where \gnat{y} produces \tnp{x}{y}, since the \gnat produces the \tnp com-
mand as well as its first argument.
Warning: Don’t define a command that produces a \newcommand or
\renewcommand command. When you find yourself wanting to do things like
that, you should either wait until the urge passes or else read Chapter 20 of The
TEXbook and become a full-fledged TEX macro hacker.
3.1.2 Lengths
A length is a measure of distance. Many LATEX commands take a length as an
argument—for example, the \hspace command for leaving a horizontal space.
Typing \hspace{1in} leaves a one-inch space. The length 1in can also be
represented in metric units as 2.54cm or 25.4mm. This length is approximately
equal to 72pt, where pt denotes point—a unit of length popular with printers.
Lengths can also be negative, like -2.54cm.
Warning: 0 is not a length. A length of zero is written 0in or 0cm or 0pt, not
0. This is a common mistake, so be careful.
While inches and points are convenient units, they usually work only for
a specific format. A space of .25 inches that looks right for one page layout
may look terrible if the pages are made narrower, or if you switch from one- to
two-column pages. It’s better to use units of length that change with the page
layout and document style. The simplest such units are the em and the ex. A
1em length is about equal to the width of an “M”, and 1ex is about the height
of the letter “x”. These units vary with the type size and style. The em is best
used for horizontal lengths and the ex for vertical lengths. Here’s an em ruler
for the current font
10 20 30
and here’s an ex ruler.

10 20 30
Here’s an em ruler for the small Roman font.
10 20 30
In addition to writing explicit lengths like 1in or 3.5em, you can also express
lengths in terms of length commands. A length command is a command whose
value is a length. One example of a length command is \parindent, whose value
is the distance by which the beginning of a paragraph is indented. The command
\hspace{\parindent} leaves a horizontal space of length
\parindent. You can also type 2.5\parindent for a length that’s 2.5 times
as large as the \parindent length, or -2.5\parindent for the negative of that
length. As you’d expect, -\parindent is the same as -1.0\parindent.
Below is a list of some other length commands that are used by LATEX. A
more complete list is given in Section 3.5.3. By expressing lengths in terms of
these length commands, you can make your formatting commands work with
different document styles.
\parindent: The paragraph indentation.

\textwidth: The width of text on the page.
\textheight: The height of the text on a page, excluding the running head
and the page number.
\parskip: The extra vertical space inserted between paragraphs.
\baselineskip: The normal vertical distance from the bottom of one line to
the bottom of the next line in the same paragraph. Thus, \textwidth ÷
\baselineskip equals the number of lines of text that would appear on
a page if it were all one paragraph.
A length like \parindent is a rigid length. If the value of \parindent is

1cm, then every \hspace{1cm} command produces exactly the same amount of
space, which will be about 1cm wide. (It may not be exactly 1cm because your
output device can uniformly change the size of all dimensions—for example, it
might magnify everything by 5%.) However, there are also rubber lengths that
can vary. The space that TEX puts between words has a rubber length, so it
can stretch or shrink as required. This space stretches or shrinks just enough
so the whole line has the required width, which is how TEX right-justifies lines.
Section 3.2.1 explains how to create one kind of useful rubber space. Most of
the time you don’t need to worry about rubber spaces, but you should be aware
that they exist. Of the length commands described above, only \parskip is a
rubber length; the rest are rigid.
LATEX provides the following declarations for the values of length commands
and for creating new length commands. These declarations obey the usual scope
rules.
\newlength: Used to define a new length command. You type
\newlength{\gnat}
to make \gnat a length command with value 0in. An error occurs if a

\gnat command already exists.
\setlength: Used to set the value of a length command. Typing
\setlength{\gnat}{.01in}
defines the length \gnat to be .01 inches.

\addtolength: Increments a length by a specified amount. If the current value
of \gnat is .01 inches, then the command
\addtolength{\gnat}{-.1\gnat}
changes the value to .009 inches—its original value plus -.1 times its orig-
inal value.
\settowidth: Sets the value of a length command equal to the width of a
specified piece of text. The command
\settowidth{\gnat}{\it small}
sets \gnat to the width of the text small—i.e., the width of the text
produced by typesetting
{\it small}
Note that TEX is in LR mode when processing the second argument of the
\settowidth command.
If you create a length command with \newlength, then you can change its
value any time you please. This is also the case for some of LATEX’s lengths,
such as \parindent. Some lengths, like \textwidth and \textheight, can
be changed only before the \begin{document} command. Others, like the re-
maining lengths from the previous list, can be changed in the middle of the
document, but only with extreme care. Still others should never be changed
at all. Before changing the value of any of LATEX’s lengths, you should consult
Section 3.5.3 to find out when you’re allowed to do so.
3.1.3 Counters
Everything LATEX numbers for you has a counter associated with it. The name
of the counter is the same as the name of the environment or command that
produces the number, except with no \ . Below is a list of the counters created
by LATEX when you’re using the report document style.
chapter figure footnote

section table mpfootnote
subsection equation enumerate
subsubsection page list
(The mpfootnote counter is explained in Section 3.2.2 on page 83.) In addition,

an environment created with the \newtheorem command of Section 2.2.1 has
a counter of the same name, so a theorem environment will have a theorem
counter.
The value of a counter is a single nonnegative integer. Things that have mul-
tiple numbers get those numbers from multiple counters, so Section 2.8 has that
number because the chapter counter has the value 2 and the section counter
has the value 8. The initial value of a counter is zero, and it is incremented
by the appropriate command or environment. For example, the \section com-
mand increments the section counter before it generates the section number.
The section counter is reset to zero when the chapter counter is incremented,
causing section numbers to start again from one in the new chapter.
You can set the value of a counter with the \setcounter command, where
\setcounter{footnote}{17}
sets the value of the footnote counter to 17. The first \footnote command
following this \setcounter command will look like this.18
The addtocounter command increments the counter by the specified
amount, so
\addtocounter{footnote}{-2}
decreases the value of the footnote counter by two. When solving tricky
footnote-placement problems, as discussed in Section 2.4.1, you should remem-
ber that the footnote counter is incremented by the \footnotemark command,
but not by the \footnotetext command.
The \setcounter and \addtocounter commands affect only the specified
counter. Changing the chapter counter does not affect the section counter.
The commands to change counter values are global declarations, their effects
are not limited by the normal scope rules for declarations.
18 Remember that it’s numbered 18 because the counter is stepped by the \footnote com-
mand before the number is generated.

The page, enumerate and list counters are somewhat different from the
rest. The page counter is used to generate the page number. It differs from the
other counters in that its value is the number of the current page (the next one
to be written out), so a \setcounter{page}{27} in the middle of the document
causes the current page to be numbered 27. For this reason, the page counter
is initialized to one instead of zero.
The enumerate and list counters, used by the enumerate and list envi-
ronments to number list items, are also exceptional. These counters are reset
to zero upon entry to the environment, so any change to their values has no
effect after exiting from the environment. These counters are incremented by
the \item command. However, they are not incremented by an \item command
that has an optional argument.
In addition to changing the value of a counter, you can change the way that
value is printed. For example, you can get the section number to print as “II-C”
instead of “2.3”. LATEX provides a number of commands for printing counter
values in different ways. Their use is explained below, under the assumption
that the value of the subsection counter is 3, as it is right now in this document.
Typing Gives
\arabic{subsection} 3
\roman{subsection} iii
\Roman{subsection} III
\alph{subsection} c
\Alph{subsection} C
The \newnumbering command redefines the way LATEX prints the number
for the indicated counter. For example, if you want the third section of the
second chapter to be numbered “II-C” instead of “2.3”, you type the command
\newnumbering{section}{\Roman{chapter}-\Alph{section}}
The \section command will then produce the desired section numbers—in both
the section heading and the table of contents entry.
You’ll seldom want to change the way sections are numbered in just part of
your document, so the obvious place for a \newnumbering command is before
the \begin{document} command. However, \newnumbering is an ordinary
declaration, obeying the usual scoping rules.
LATEX provides a single \pagenumbering command that changes the way
pages are numbered and resets the page number. The command
\pagenumbering{roman}
has the same effect as
\newnumbering{page}{\roman{page}}
\setcounter{page}{1}
except that it acts like a global declaration.

You can’t use the \newnumbering command on the footnote, mpfootnote,
or enumerate counter. To change the way footnotes are numbered, you must
use a different document style. If you don’t like the way enumerated lists are
numbered, you can create your own with the list environment described in
Section 3.4.4. You can’t use \newnumbering for the list counter either, but
there’s no reason you’d want to.
3.2 Spaces and Boxes

The simplest kind of do-it-yourself formatting in LATEX involves the use of spac-
ing and box-making commands. You should read Section 3.1.2 on page 73 before
trying to learn about these commands.
3.2.1 Spaces
Horizontal space is added with the \hspace command. For example, typing
produces a \hspace{.25in} .25-inch space.
produces a .25-inch space. More precisely, it produces a blank “word”
that is .25 inch wide. TEX will leave space around this blank word, just as it
leaves space around any word. If you want the space between the “a” and the
“.25-inch” to be exactly .25 inch, then you should type
a\hspace{.25in}.25-inch space.
You can add negative as well as positive space with an \hspace command.
Adding negative space is like backspacing. You can do /////
funny weird things by
typing
funny\hspace{-2.7em}///// weird
Whenever you type a between two words, TEX puts a space between
them. However, it removes that space if the first word ends a line and the
second one begins a new line. TEX treats the space produced by an \hspace
command the same as ordinary interword space, and may remove it. If you
want the space to appear even if it would be at the beginning or end of a line,
then use an \hspace* command. This *-variant is the same as the ordinary
\hspace command, except that the space it produces is never removed.
The command \s is an abbreviation for the the \hspace command. It has
no *-form. The \s command can be used in some places where \hspace can’t,
including the argument of a sectioning command or table of contents command
(Section 2.5) and an @-expression in an array or tabular environment (Sections
2.3.4 and 3.4.2).
Vertical space is added by the \vspace command. The usual place for a
\vspace command is between paragraphs, where it adds the indicated space
between the paragraphs. If a \vspace command comes in the middle of a
paragraph, then the vertical space is added after the line in which it appears.
I obtained the extra vertical space in this paragraph by typing paragraph by
starting the paragraph with
Vertical \vspace{.1in} space is added ...
LATEX provides three standard vertical spacing commands to add extra space
between paragraphs: \smallskip, \medskip, and \bigskip. The
\smallskip command is an abbreviation for \vspace{\smallskipamount},
where \smallskipamount is a length determined by the document style. The
other two commands are similarly abbreviations for \vspace’s of
\medskipamount and \bigskipamount. These are rubber lengths, which can
stretch or shrink a bit. The amount of vertical space added by these commands
when no stretching or shrinking takes place is shown below.
\smallskip:
\medskip:
\bigskip:
Just as it removes horizontal space that comes at the end of a line, TEX
removes vertical space that comes at the end of a page. To create vertical space
that is never removed, use a \vspace* command.
Spaces with stretchable lengths are usually of interest only to people who
design document styles. However, a space that stretches as much as it can
is useful for centering objects in a box or pushing them to one side of the
box. The command \hfill produces such a horizontal space. You should
think of an \hfill as a spring that pushes things away from it; if two or more
\hfill’s “fight” one another, they produce equal-length spaces. As an example
of how the \hfill command is used, consider the description environment
described in Section 2.2.2. Each item label is put in a box of a fixed width. The
\hfill command can move text around in that box, as shown by the following
description environment which is begun with a
\begin{description}{gnomes:}
command, and where the \item command generating each label is shown. A
rectangle is drawn around the label box to make the spacing easier to see; it
doesn’t really appear in the output.
gnu: \item[gnu:] — The label is normally moved to the left of the box.
gnu: \item[\hfill gnu:] — The \hfill pushes the “gnu:” to the right
of the box.
gnu : \item[gnu\hfill :] — The \hfill pushed the “gnu” and the “:”
to opposite sides of the box.
gnu: \item[\hfill gnu:\hfill] — The two \hfill’s push the label to
the center of the box.
gnomes: \item[\hfill gnomes:] — The \hfill does nothing because the
“gnomes:” already fills the box, so there’s nowhere to push it.
Sometimes, instead of just creating a rubber space, you’d like to fill that
space with something. The \dotfill command acts just like \hfill except it
produces dots instead of spaces. The command \hrulefill works the same,
except it produces a horizontal rule. They are illustrated below.
Typing Gives
\item[g\dotfill :] g......:
\item[g\hrulefill :] g :
3.2.2 Boxes
You learned in Section 1.5 that a box is a chunk of text that TEX treats as a unit,
just as if it were a single letter. If you leave a blank line before it, the box will
start a new paragraph—complete with paragraph indentation. You’ll often want
to center a box in a line by itself. The easiest way to do this is to pretend that
the box is a mathematical formula and use the \[ ... \] commands described
in Section 2.3 on page 42.
LATEX provides a number of commands for making boxes. There are three
general kinds of boxes: LR boxes, in which the contents of the box is processed in
LR mode, parboxes, in which the contents of the box is processed in paragraph
mode, and rule boxes that consist of just a rectangular blob of ink. A box-
making command can be used in any mode, and the declarations in effect at
that point in the document are used in typesetting the contents of the box. For
example, if a bold typeface has been declared, then the text in the box will
appear in boldface, unless another typeface declaration is made. An exception
is that the math-italic typeface, described in 2.3.8, will be used only in math
mode. When a box-making command appears inside math mode, the typeface
chosen is the most recently declared typeface other than math italic—usually
the one in effect outside the math formula.
Declarations made inside a box are local to the box. In other words, the
braces around the text-producing argument are “staircase” braces, as described
on page 16 of Section 1.4.2.
LR Boxes
We’ve already encountered the \mbox command, which produces a box contain-
ing its argument, processed in LR mode. The command \mbox is an abbrevia-
tion for the \makebox command. However, the \makebox command has optional
arguments, which the \mbox command doesn’t.
The box created by an \mbox command is just wide enough to hold the
text created by its argument. You can specify the size of the box by using the
\makebox with an optional argument. Typing
\makebox[1in]{gnu}
creates a box whose width is 1in, having “gnu” centered within it. You can
put the “gnu” at the left of the box by adding a second optional argument as
follows:
\makebox[1in][l]{gnu}
Replacing the l by an r puts the “gnu” at the right of the box.
The \makebox command provides a hackish way of formatting things your-
self. For example, you can generate
Armadillo: 1147.2
Gnat: —
Gnu: 322
with the following input. (See Section 2.2 for an explanation of the quote
environment and the \raggedright and \\ commands.)
\begin{quote} \raggedright
\makebox[.75in][l]{Armadillo:}\makebox
[.4in][r]{1147.2} \\
\makebox[.75in][l]{Gnat:}\makebox[.4in]{---} \\
\makebox[.75in][l]{Gnu:}\makebox[.4in][r]{322}
\end{quote}
The environments of Section 3.4 provide much easier ways of doing this kind
of formatting; this example is given only to illustrate the \makebox command.
In addition to the positioning obtained with the \makebox’s second optional
argument, you can also move things around inside the box by adding spaces—
especially the rubber spaces provided by the \hfill command of Section 3.2.1.
When you provide a width argument to a \makebox command, LATEX as-
sumes that to be the width of the box—even if the text in the box is wider. If
you say that the box is 1in wide, LATEX will leave one inch for it. If the text in
the box is wider than one inch, then it will stick outside the space reserved for
the box and may overlap surrounding text. On which side the text sticks out
depends on where the text is positioned in the box, as indicated below.
\makebox[.25in]{big armadillos} big armadillos

\makebox[.25in][l]{big armadillos} big armadillos
\makebox[.25in][r]{big armadillos} big armadillos
An especially useful instance of this is to put text in a box of zero width, which
makes TEX act as if the text took up no horizontal space. This would produce
absurd results if done in ordinary text, but it can be very helpful in making
arrays and tables with the commands described in Section 3.4. Remember,
though, that the width must be written as something like 0in, not just as 0.
You can specify the height as well as the width of the box by giving another
kind of optional argument to the \makebox command. This is generally used
only in the picture environment, so it is described in Section 3.4.3.
The \framebox command is exactly the same as the \makebox command,
except it puts a frame around the outside of the box that it creates. For example,
you can produce gnu by typing
produce \framebox[.5in][l]{gnu} by typing

There’s also an \fbox command that’s an abbreviation for a \framebox with
no optional arguments. Typing \fbox{gnu} produces gnu .
The \framebox command produces a rule of thickness \fboxrule, and leaves
a space of \fboxsep between the rule and the contents of the box. You can
change these length commands at will, as described in Section 3.1.2.
Sometimes you’ll use a single piece of text in several places. The \newcommand
command described in Section 3.1.1 will define a command that produces the
text. However, every time TEX encounters this command, it will have to go
through all the trouble of typesetting the text again. If the text is complicated—
especially if it contains a picture environment—TEX will waste a lot of time
typesetting it over and over again.
The \savebox command allows you to create and save a box which can then
be used as many times as you want. LATEX provides ten storage bins for saving
boxes. The bins are numbered 0 through 9, and each one can hold a single
box. The command \savebox3 acts exactly like a \makebox command except
that instead of printing the box, it saves it in storage bin 3. You can print the
contents of storage bin 3 any time by giving the command \usebox3. Of course,
the 3 can be any digit from 0 through 9. For example, if I type
\savebox7[1in][r]{\fbox{good} \fbox{gnus}}
somewhere earlier in the text, then typing
this is \usebox7.
produces
this is good gnus .
The command \sbox is the short form of \savebox when it has no optional
arguments.
The \savebox and \sbox commands are declarations, with the usual scope
rules.
parboxes
A parbox is a box whose contents are created in paragraph mode. Several en-
vironments create parboxes—for example, the figure and table environments
described in Section 2.4.2. There are two ways to create parboxes in ordinary
text: with the \parbox command and the minipage environment.
“Small” parboxes, containing little text, can be made with the \parbox
command. This command has two mandatory arguments: a length that specifies
the width of the parbox, and the text that goes inside the parbox.
A parbox in the middle of
This observation, which was contained in a par-
text looks rather strange.
box 1.5 inches wide, was made by typing
\fbox{\parbox{1.5in}{A parbox ... strange.}}
This observation ...
(See Section 3.2.2 above for a description of the \fbox command.) There is no
paragraph indentation inside the parbox because the \parindent length that
specifies the amount of indentation is set to zero. You can set it to any other
value with the commands of Section 3.1.2.
Notice that the parbox was vertically positioned so its center lined up with
the center of the text line. An optional first argument allows you to line up
either the top or bottom line of the parbox. The equation
This is a b This is a
This is a t + parbox. = plain par-
parbox. box.
was produced by typing
\[ \parbox[t]{.6in}{This is a {\tt t} parbox.} +
\parbox[b]{.6in}{This is a {\tt b} parbox.} =
\parbox{.6in}{This is a plain parbox.} \]
If you need finer control of the vertical positioning, see the description of the
\raisebox command in Section 3.2.2.
These examples are all quite silly, but there are perfectly reasonable situa-
tions in which you’ll want to use a parbox—for example, to place text inside a
picture.
The \parbox command is used for a parbox containing a small piece of
text, with nothing fancy inside. In particular, you shouldn’t use any of the
paragraph-making environments described in Section 2.2 inside a \parbox ar-
gument. For larger pieces of text, including ones containing a paragraph-making
environment, you should use a minipage environment. This environment takes
the same optional position argument and mandatory width argument as the
\parbox command. Thus, the above example could have been typed as
\[ \begin{minipage}[t]{.6in}
This is a {\tt t} parbox.
\end{minipage} + ...
Footnotes in a minipage environment are handled in a way that is partic-
ularly useful for putting footnotes in figures or tables. To understand it, you
should first read the description of the footnote commands in Section 2.4.1 on
page 57. A \footnote or \footnotetext command puts the footnote at the
bottom of the minipage instead of at the bottom of the page, and it uses the
mpfootnote counter instead of the ordinary footnote counter. Moreover, these
commands can be used anywhere in the minipage environment—even inside
another box-making command. To get an ordinary footnote that goes at the
bottom of the regular page, you can use the \footnotemark command as usual.
Warning: Don’t put one minipage environment inside another if you are using
footnotes; they may wind up at the bottom of the wrong minipage.
Warning: If a minipage environment begins or ends with one of the paragraph-
making environments described in Section 2.2, it will put extra vertical space at
the top or bottom of the minipage, respectively. The extra space at the top of the
minipage equals the value of the \parsep length command. It can be cancelled
by a \vspace*{-\parsep} command at the beginning of the minipage. (See
Section 3.2.1 for a description of the spacing commands.) Exactly how much
extra space is put at the bottom of the minipage will depend upon the situation.
It can be cancelled by a \vspace of an appropriate negative length at the end
of the minipage environment. Remember that you must use a \vspace* at the
beginning and a \vspace at the end.
Rule Boxes
A rule box is a rectangular blob of ink. It is made with the \rule command,
which has two mandatory arguments that specify the width and height of the
blob. Thus, typing \rule{.25in}{.02in} produces . The command has an
optional first argument that specifies how high to raise the rule. Thus, typing
\rule[.5ex]{.25in}{.02in} produces , the same rule as before raised a
distance of .5ex. You can lower the rule by raising it a negative distance. Note
that a thin enough rule is just a line, so the \rule command allows you to draw
horizontal or vertical lines of arbitrary length and thickness.
A rule whose width is zero is called a strut. Since it has no width, a strut
is invisible. However, a strut does have height, and TEX will adjust its vertical
spacing exactly as if there were a box there. You can get some idea of how
struts are used by considering
box and box
which was produced by typing

\fbox{box} and \fbox{\rule[-1ex]{0ex}{3ex}box}
Raising and Lowering Boxes

Sometimes you want to raise or lower text. This is done with the \raisebox
command, as I just did by typing
to \raisebox{.4ex}{raise} or \raisebox{-.4ex}{lower}
The first argument specifies how high the text is to be raised. The text itself is
processed in LR mode, so \raisebox{0in}{...} is equivalent to \mbox{...}.
Sometimes it’s useful to make TEX think something has a different size than
it really does—or a different size than TEX would normally think it has. Sec-
tion 3.2.2 tells you how to use the \makebox command to change how wide TEX
thinks something is. The \raisebox command lets you tell TEX how tall it is.
Typing
\raisebox{.4ex}[1.5ex][.75ex]{text}
not only raises text by .4ex, it also makes TEX thinks that the text extends
1.5ex above the bottom of the line and .75ex below the bottom of the line.
(The “bottom” of the line is where most characters sit; some letters like y extend
below the bottom of the line.) If you omit the second optional argument, TEX
will think it sticks as far below the line as it actually does.
Changing how tall TEX thinks something is changes how much space TEX
leaves for it. If I make a rule like by typing \rule{.01in}{.25in}, TEX leaves
an extra vertical so the rule doesn’t extend into the preceding line. However, I
can produce a rule like that does extend into the preceding line by typing
\raisebox{0in}[0in]{\rule{.01in}{.25in}}
3.3 Line and Page Breaking

The first thing TEX does when processing ordinary text is to translate your
input file into a string of glyphs and spaces. To produce a printed document,
this string must be broken into lines, and these lines must be broken into pages.
In some environments, you do the line breaking yourself with the \\ command,
but TEX usually does it for you. TEX does a very good job of line and page
breaking, but sometimes it needs your help. When it does, you can read Sections
3.3.2 and 3.3.3 to find out what to do.
3.3.1 The \\ Command

The \\ command tells TEX to start a new line. It has an optional argument
that specifies how much extra vertical space is to be left after the line. A
negative argument causes TEX to leave less space than usual. There’s also a
*-form, which is exactly the same as the ordinary form except it also tells TEX
not to start a new page after the line. Thus, I produced
GNOMES and GNUS
and
gnats
by D. Knudson
by typing
\begin{center}
GNOMES and GNUS \\*[5pt]
{\scriptsize and} \\[-4pt]
{\scriptsize gnats} \\*
by D.\ Knudson
\end{center}
I allowed a page break only between the and and the gnats.
You normally do your own line breaking with the \\ command in the
following environments:
array verse flushleft
tabular center flushright
tabbing
You also use \\ in the \shortstack command, described in Section 3.4.3
and in the scope of a \centering, \raggedright, or \raggedleft command.
The *-option is redundant in the array and tabular environments and in the
\shortstack command, since TEX can never start a new page in the middle of
them.
You can also use a \\ command whenever you’re in
paragraph mode as I just did by typing
you’re in \\*[.1in] paragraph mode
Warning: The amount of vertical space added by a \\[...] command may

not be what you expect—especially in the array and tabular environments.
When this happens, you can find the right argument for the \\ command by
experimentation.
Some people don’t like typing \\ after every line in an environment like

center, and would rather let LATEX start a new line at every in the input.
This is a thoroughly bad idea, and you should forget all about it. However, if
you’re so foolish as to ignore my warnings, LATEX does provide a way for you to

do this. The declaration \obeycr makes a synonymous with a \\ command.
The example that began this section could also have been produced by typing
\begin{center} \obeycr
GNOMES and GNUS
*[5pt]{\scriptsize and}
[-4pt]{\scriptsize gnats}
*by D.\ Knudson
\end{center}
There are two things to note here:

• The \obeycr makes completely synonymous with \\ , right down to
the *-form and optional argument.

• A immediately following the \obeycr command is ignored. This is the

only that is ignored in the scope of the \obeycr declaration. However,

everything following a % up to and including the at the end of the line
is still considered a comment and is ignored.

The declaration \restorecr is the inverse of \obeycr, restoring to its
normal status as a space-producing character.
You can use \obeycr and get away with it most of the time. However,

changing the meaning of this way is a tricky business, and sooner or later
you’ll run into trouble. The \obeycr command is the only LATEX command
that comes with no guarantee of satisfaction. If funny things happen when you
use it, don’t complain to me.
3.3.2 Line Breaking

TEX is a perfectionist when it comes to line breaking. It isn’t satisfied unless it
can find a good way to break a paragraph into lines. Very often, it can find no
way that meets its standards. Since TEX can’t bear the thought of producing
a bad-looking paragraph, it produces a horrible one with a word sticking past
the right margin, knowing that you’ll have to do something about it. When this
happens, it types an “Overfull \hbox” message, like

[]\tenrm Is there a lit-tle town in Wales called Llegharffys-lough-lar-waghau-r
llysgn-
\hbox(6.94444+ ...
which you saw on page 25 in Section 1.7, when we ran LATEX on the input shown
in Figure 1.1. If you were to look closely at the output, you’d find the following
line
Is there a little town in Wales called Llegharffysloughlarwaghaurllysgn-
sticking 1.94412 points beyond the right margin. In some document styles,
there’d also be a black bar like this next to it.
The hyphens in the warning message tell us where TEX was willing to hy-
phenate words in its attempt to find a good place for a line break. TEX is very
good at hyphenating, and it will usually find all correct hyphenation points.
However, here we obviously have an exceptional case. Despite a valiant try us-
ing its built-in hyphenation rules, TEX couldn’t find enough hyphenation points
in
Llegharffysloughlarwaghaurllysgnforghallyl
to break the line properly.
The simplest way around this problem is to give TEX permission to hy-
phenate the word at another place. This is done with a \- command, which
tells TEX that it may hyphenate the word at that point. We could solve this
line-breaking problem by changing our input to
Llegharffysloughlarwaghaurlly\-sgnforghallyl
which will provide TEX with the necessary extra hyphenation point. However,
we should really put a \- everywhere TEX is allowed to hyphenate this word,
since we might later change the input in such a way that it will have to break
the word at another point. It doesn’t hurt to put in lots of \- commands,
since they only permit TEX to hyphenate, they don’t force it to.
You can teach TEX to hyphenate individual words properly so you don’t
have to keep typing \- commands. For example, TEX doesn’t know how to
hyphenate the word gnomon. You could type gno\-mon all the time, but that’s
a nuisance if you use lots of gnomons in your text. Instead, you can put the
following command before the \begin{document}:
\hyphenation{gno-mon gno-mons gno-mon-ic}
This will tell TEX how to hyphenate gnomon, gnomons and gnomonic, but TEX
still won’t know how to hyphenate gnomonly (which isn’t a gnomonly used
word). You can use many separate \hyphenation commands.
Since TEX is really quite good at hyphenation, most of the time a bad line
break can’t be fixed in this way. If this happens, the best thing to do is ignore
it. Chances are that before you’re finished writing the document, the offending
paragraph will be changed and the problem will go away. Don’t fix a bad line
break until you’re absolutely definitely certainly positive that this is the final
version of the paragraph.
Okay, let’s suppose that you’re now preparing the final version and the bad
line break is still there. If adding hyphens doesn’t help, it means there’s simply
no good way to break the paragraph into lines. You then have two choices:
either rewrite the text, or convince TEX to make a not-so-good line break. You
probably won’t want to change your masterful prose and will choose the second
option.
There are two common methods of getting TEX to break lines where it
normally doesn’t want to. The easiest way is to tell TEX not to be so fussy,
which you can do with the \sloppy command. This declaration tells TEX to
accept less pleasing line breaks—ones that allow the distance between words to
stretch or shrink more. There is also the countermanding declaration \fussy
that restores TEX to its ordinary fussy self.
These declarations obey the standard scoping rules described on page 16 of
Section 1.4.2. TEX does its line breaking when it comes to the first blank line at
the end of the paragraph. Therefore, to affect the line breaking of a paragraph,
the scope of the \sloppy command must include that blank line.
The second way of fixing a bad line break is to use a \linebreak com-
mand to tell TEX exactly where the break should occur. The \linebreak
should be inserted right before the word that didn’t fit. However, this will
produce a line with a lot of blank space between the words, and may produce
an “Underfull \hbox” message.
By giving an optional argument to the \linebreak command, you convert
it from a demand that TEX break the line there to a request that it do so. The
optional argument must be a digit from 0 through 4. The higher the number,
the more insistent the request is. A \linebreak[0] command simply allows
TEX to break the line there, but doesn’t say that it’s a good or bad thing to do.
A \linebreak[4] command is equivalent to a plain \linebreak; it says that
the line must be broken there. The arguments 1, 2 and 3 provide intermediate
degrees of insistence. They will occasionally coax TEX into overcoming a bad line
break, but not very often. They are mostly good for giving it a hint about how
to do the most aesthetically pleasing job of line breaking. The \linebreak[0]
command is useful for allowing TEX to break a line where it normally wouldn’t.
Usually, the problem is coaxing TEX to break a line where you want it to.
However, sometimes you’ll find the reverse problem of trying to prevent it from
breaking a line. This is done with the \nolinebreak command, which prevents
TEX from breaking the line at that point. As with the \linebreak command,
\nolinebreak takes a digit from 0 through 4 as an optional argument, which
converts the demand into a suggestion that this isn’t such a good place to
break the line—the higher the number, the more insistent the suggestion. A
\nolinebreak[0] is equivalent to a \linebreak[0], and a \nolinebreak[4]
is equivalent to a \nolinebreak.
The \linebreak command causes TEX to stretch the line so it extends to
the right margin. The \newline command breaks the line
right where it is, as I just did by typing
... the line \newline right where ...
Like the \linebreak command, the \newline command can be used only in
paragraph mode. It is equivalent to the \\ command described in Section 3.3.1,
but has no *-form or optional argument. LATEX provides the \newline com-
mand only to maintain a complete correspondence between the line-breaking
commands of this section and the page-breaking commands of Section 3.3.3
below.
3.3.3 Page Breaking

TEX is just as fussy about page breaks as it is about line breaks. As with line
breaking, sometimes there is no good way to break a page. When TEX is forced
to make a bad page break, it warns you by typing a message like
Underfull \vbox (badness 1137) has occurred while \output is active
To figure out on what page this happened, remember that TEX prints output
page numbers on your terminal as it goes along. TEX prints [27] when it writes
page 27 onto the dvi file. The number of the bad page is the next page number
appears on your terminal after the warning message.
When you get an “Underfull \vbox” message, you should first look at
the “badness” value. If it’s less than 10000, then TEX has probably done a
reasonable job of page breaking and you’ll want to do something about it only
if you’re very very fussy and are producing the last, final, ultimate, irrevocable
version. TEX has probably done a pretty good job even if the badness is 10000,
but in this case you should look at the page to check.
TEX’s criteria for good page breaking are purely visual; it has no idea what
you’re trying to tell the reader. A page break that it finds quite all right may be
terrible because it derails the reader’s train of thought. If this happens, you’ll
have to take matters into your own hands and tell TEX where to break the page;
but remember, don’t do this until you’re ready to produce the final version.
The page-breaking commands are analogous to the line-breaking commands
described in Section 3.3.2 above, so you should read that section before going
any further. As with line breaking, LATEX provides commands both to cajole
and to order TEX to break a page where you want it to. The \pagebreak and
\nopagebreak commands are the analogues of \linebreak and \nolinebreak.
When used in the middle of a paragraph, they apply right after the line on
which they appear. Thus, a \pagebreak command insists that TEX start a new
page right after the current line, and \nopagebreak[3] suggests rather strongly
that it should not start a new page there.
The \newpage command is the analogue of the \newline command. While
\pagebreak causes the page to be stretched right to the bottom margin,
\newpage ends it right where it is. There’s also a \clearpage command that
is similar to \newpage. The difference is that if there are any figures or tables
waiting to be put onto the next page, \clearpage will put them on one or more
separate float pages with no text. In the report document style, the \chapter
command uses \clearpage to begin a new page.
An extra \newpage or \clearpage command won’t create a blank page;
two such commands in a row are equivalent to a single one. If you want to
leave a blank page, then you have to put something invisible on that page,
such as an empty box. This may seem like a nuisance, but it’s actually very
convenient to have the \newpage and \clearpage commands work this way.
These commands are called by others like \chapter, and you don’t want two
of those other commands in a row to generate a unwanted blank page.
When producing output for printing on both sides of a page, you will some-
times want to start a chapter or section on a right-hand page. The
\cleardoublepage command is the same as \clearpage except that it pro-
duces a blank page if necessary so that the next page will be a right-hand
(odd-numbered) page.
3.4 Formatting it Yourself

We now come to a number of environments that allow you to control precisely
how things are formatted. The first two, the tabbing and tabular environ-
ments, are used to align text in columns. The tabular environment is similar
to the array environment described in Section 2.3.4, except that it is for or-
dinary text rather than mathematical formulas. The tabbing and tabular
environments differ in the following ways.
• The tabbing environment can be used only in paragraph mode, and makes
a separate paragraph—just like the environments described in Section 2.2.
The tabular environment makes a box, and can be used in any mode.
• TEX can start a new page in the middle of a tabbing environment, but
not in the middle of a tabular environment. This means that a long
tabbing environment can go in the middle of your text, but a long tabular
environment should be put in a figure or table where it can float to another
page. (See Section 2.4.2.)
• TEX automatically determines the widths of the columns in the tabular
environment; you have to do that yourself in the tabbing environment.
• It’s easy to change the formatting in the middle of a tabbing environ-

ment—for example, to change the number of columns, but hard to do in
the tabular environment.
The tabbing and tabular environments allow you to specify the horizontal
positioning in order to make neat columns. The picture environment allows
you to specify the precise horizontal and vertical positioning of every item, and
to draw lines, arrows and circles. Its primary use is for drawing diagrams, but
it can be used as a last resort to solve any formatting problem.
The list environment allows you to produce the kind of paragraph-making
environments described in Section 2.2, except exactly the way you want them.
The verbatim environment is used mainly for writing instruction manuals for
computer users, in which you want to show the reader what he or the computer
types on his terminal. It reproduces as closely as possible exactly what you
type on your terminal, and is the one environment in which TEX’s ten special
characters act just like ordinary characters.
3.4.1 The tabbing Environment

LATEX’s tabbing environment provides a way to format programs and other
material in which text must be aligned in columns. It works by setting tab
stops and tabbing to them much the way you do with an ordinary typewriter.
To give a precise description of the tabbing environment commands, I’ll start
by defining some terminology. Each line of a tabbing environment consists of
columns. Columns are begun by tab stops. Tab stop 0, which begins column 1,
is always set at the prevailing left margin of the tabbing environment. Column
2 begins at tab stop 1, and so on. The prevailing left margin is the ordinary left
margin unless you’re in the middle of some paragraph-making environment like
itemize that changes the left margin.
• A tabbing environment inside this itemize environment might have the
following tab stops and columns.
tab stop tab stop tab stop
0 1 2
column 1 column 2 column 3
The vertical lines don’t actually appear, they are drawn here and in the remain-
ing examples to make it easy to see the columns.
Each line has a local left margin, which is set at a tab stop. Text in a line
normally begins at the local left margin, so if the local left margin is set at
tab stop 2, then the text will normally begin in column 3. However, by issuing
special commands, you can put text to the left of a line’s local left margin. At
the start of the tabbing environment, there is just a single column and a single
tab stop—column 1 and tab stop 0; the left margin is set at tab stop 0.
Let’s suppose that we’ve set tab stops 1 through 5, so there are six columns
(columns 1 though 6), and the local left margin is currently set at tab stop 2,
as shown below.
0 1 2 3 4 5
When we begin typing the current line of text, what we type will start at tab
stop 2, which marks the beginning of column 3. If we type the command \>
(pronounced “tab”), the subsequent text will begin at tab stop 3—that is, at
the beginning of column 4. Another \> command takes us to tab stop 4, which
is the beginning of column 5, and so on. The line is ended by the \\ command,
which is described, along with its optional argument and *-form, in Section 3.3.1
on page 86. Thus, typing
gnu \> gneisses \> \> gnarl \\
u \> e \> g
produces the following two lines in the tabbing environment.
gnu gneisses gnarl
u e g
Again, remember that the vertical lines are only for clarity; they are not pro-
duced by the tabbing command. Although I aligned the input to make it easier
to read, TEX paid no attention. As usual, it doesn’t matter whether you type
one space or fifty.
If you put more text in a column than will fit, then the next \> command
may move the current position to the left in order to put it at the next tab
stop. For example, the first \> command after gneisses in the above example
moved took us to tab stop 4 (about where the second s began, and the next
\> took us to tab stop 5. This is not the way the tab key on a typewriter works;
you can overwrite text with a \> command.
The left margin of the next and all following lines is moved one tab stop to
the right by the command \+ , and is moved one tab stop to the left by the
command \- .
Tab stops are set using the \= command. The easiest way to think of this
command is that it is the same as \> except the appropriate tab stop is set so
that the \> has no effect. More precisely, if this command appears in the text
of column i, it sets tab stop i to the current text position and begins column
i + 1. Thus, typing
\begin{tabbing}
gnomon \= agnostic \= arma\= dillo \= gnash \=
\+\+ \\
gnu \> gneisses \> \> gnarl \\
u \> e \> g
\end{tabbing}
produces the following.

gnomon agnostic armadillo gnash
gnu gneisses gnarl
u e g
Note the effect of spaces in this example. Commands like \= and \>

“gobble up” spaces—that is, and characters—that follow them, but
spaces that precede them do count. You should not put blank lines in a tabbing
environment.
When using the tabbing environment, you’ll often find that you want to set
tab stops without producing text. This is done with the command \kill, which
is just like \\ except that it throws away the current line instead of producing
output for it. The effect of any \= , \+ or \- in that line remains. Thus,
replacing the first \\ in the above example by \kill produces the output of
the preceding example on page 3.4.1. Unlike \\ , the \kill command has no
optional argument or *-form.
The \< command allows you to put something to the left of the local left
margin without changing the margin—that is, without having to use \+ and
\- commands. A \< command at the beginning of a line has the effect of
moving the current text position one tab stop to the left without changing the
current margin. You can use as many \< commands in a row as you want,
as long as you don’t try to go past tab stop 0, but they must appear at the
beginning of the line.
With the above commands, it is easy to get text flushed left at the beginning
of a column. However, you may want text flushed right at the end of a column.
This can be done with the \’ command. This command moves everything that
you have typed so far in the current column—everything starting from the most
recent \> , \< , \’ , \\ , or \kill command—to the right of the previous
column, flush against the current column’s tab stop. The command leaves you
positioned once again at the beginning of the current column. To see how it
works, let’s once again assume that the current left margin is at tab stop 2.
Typing
a \> b \>c \> d \\
dillo:\’ a \> \> ma\’ c
produces the following.
a b c d
dillo: a ma c
The \’ command doesn’t push the text right up against the tab stop, but
leaves some space between the text and the tab stop. The space left by the \’
to the right of the text is the value of the length command \tabbingsep. It can
be set at will with the commands of Section 3.1.2.
The \’ command allows you to put text flushed right against any tab stop,
including tab stop 0. (Putting text to the left of tab stop 0 may cause it to
extend into the page margin.) However, it can’t move text to the right of the
last column because there’s no tab stop there. The \‘ command moves all
the the text that follows it, up to the \\ or \end{tabbing} command that
ends the line, to the right margin of the tabbing environment. There must be
no \> or \’ command between the \‘ and the command that ends the line.
Remember that \’ moves text to the left and \‘ moves text to the right.
These commands make it easy to put text at the left or right of any column.
Getting text centered in a column isn’t as easy, but it can be done using the box-
making and length commands of Sections 3.2.2 and 3.1.2. However, centering
text in a column is quite simple with the tabular environment, so perhaps
that’s what you should be using if you need centered columns.
Finally, you may want to change your tab stop settings for a few lines and
then return to the original settings. If you type a \pushtabs command, all the
tab stop settings you then make disappear when you type \poptabs, reverting
to their previous settings. You can nest \pushtabs and \poptabs commands in
the obvious way. However, every \pushtab in the tabbing environment must
have a corresponding \poptab.
Warning Each column entry in a tabbing environment is a separate LR box.
This means that TEX is in LR mode when it is processing each entry. Decla-
rations in a tabbing environment are local to the entry in which they appear.
More precisely, the scope of any declaration extends only up to the next tabbing
command, where the tabbing commands are the following:
\> \< \= \+ \- \\ \kill \’ \‘
\pushtabs \poptabs \end{tabbing}
Since each column entry is a separate LR box, any environment begun in
one entry must be ended in the same column. Thus, no environment can con-
tain any of the above tabbing commands unless it contains the entire tabbing
environment.
Warning: In Section 2.1.3 on page 32, you learned that the commands \‘ ,
\’ and \= are used for producing accents. However, when inside a tabbing
environment, they are the tabbing commands described in this section. This
means that they can’t be used to produce accents in a tabbing environment.
This will seldom be a problem. However, if you need to put “Sousé” in a
tabbing environment, you use a \savebox command outside the environment
to save the “Sousé”, and put a \usebox where you want it to go. (The \savebox
and \usebox commands are described in Section 3.2.2.)
Outside the tabbing environment, the \- command affects TEX’s line-

breaking algorithm, as described in Section 3.3.2. The only time TEX will be
breaking lines for you inside a tabbing environment is in a parbox, and \- , \’ ,
\‘ , and \= have their ordinary paragraph-mode meanings inside a parbox.
3.4.2 The tabular and array Environments

The tabular and array environments are almost identical, so most of Sec-
tion 2.3.4 applies to both of them. You should turn to page 49 and read that
section if you haven’t already done so. You should also read about the \\
command in Section 3.3.1 on page 86.
The following are the only differences between the tabular and array en-
vironments.
• The tabular environment can be used in any mode, the array environ-
ment can be used only in math mode.
• TEX is in LR mode when processing the entries of a tabular environment,
and in math mode when processing the entries of an array environment.
• TEX is in LR mode when processing an @-expression of a tabular envi-
ronment, but in math mode when processing an @-expression of an array
environment.
In practice, these differences mean that you should use an array environment
only for mathematical formulas, and otherwise use the tabular environment.
Both environments produce a box.
In Section 2.3.4, you learned about the following items in an array or
tabular environment’s argument:
r l c @{ ... }
(Don’t forget the restrictions on what can go into an @-expression.) There are
three more things that can go into the argument. A | produces a vertical line
between columns. You can put as many |’s in a row as you want—for example,
writing ||| puts three vertical lines between columns.
A *-expression allows you to repeat a portion of an argument an indicated
number of times. Writing
*{7}{r|l|}
is equivalent to writing
r|l|r|l|r|l|r|l|r|l|r|l|r|l|
which is seven copies of r|l| . You can nest one *-expression inside another in
the obvious way.
You may want a single entry in a tabular environment to have several rows
of text. You can do this by placing a \parbox command in the entry. (See
Section 3.2.2 on page 83 for an explanation of parboxes.) However, you can let
every entry in a column be a parbox by using a p-expression in the environment
argument. For example, the input
\begin{tabular}{lp{1in}}
First Item: & This is a rather tiny parbox \\[.1in]
Second Item: & This is another tiny parbox
\end{tabular} \]
produces the following
First Item: This is a rather

tiny parbox
Second Item: This is another
tiny parbox
Note that the “argument” of the p-expression is the width of the parbox. You
can use a p-expression in an array as well as a tabular environment, but you’d
rarely do so. Also, recall what I said in Section 3.3.1 about the amount of space
left by a \\[...] command and note how much space the \\[.1in] actually
produced.
Warning: In a parbox created by an ordinary \parbox command, \\ has its
normal meaning of “start a new paragraph in the parbox”. This is not true of
the parbox created by a p-expression, where \\ has the meaning of “start a
new line in the tabular or array environment”.
A | in the environment’s argument puts a vertical line through the en-
tire environment. Sometimes you may want to put a vertical line in just a
single entry. This is done with the \vline command. An \hline command
puts a horizontal line across all columns of a tabular or array environment.
This command can appear only right after a \\ command or right after the
environment’s \begin command.
You can make an entry that spans several columns with a \multicolumn
command. The command
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{wide entry}
creates an entry, with the text “wide entry”, that spans three columns. This
three-column entry is formatted according to the specifier |c| , so the wide
entry is centered in it and there are vertical lines on either side of the three-
column space.
The second argument of a \multicolumn command may contain anything
that can appear in a tabular environment’s format, except that there may be at
AT&T Common Stock

Year Price Dividend
1973 46-51 $2.87
4 40-53 3.24
5 45-52 Gr: Nt:
3.40 1.73
6 51-59 .95a
a
(first quarter only)
Figure 3.1: A grand example.
most one c, l or r. (If there is none, then the third argument is ignored.) This
argument replaces the items for the corresponding columns from the tabular or
array environment’s argument, which may include | items and @-expressions.
(We don’t have to worry about *-expressions because they’re expanded into
the requisite number of copies of their argument.) This raises the following
question: to what column does a | or an @-expression in the environment’s
argument belong? The answer is given by the following rule:
Every column after the first is begun by a c, l or r.
Thus, the tabular environment argument |c|l@{ : }lr| comprises the four
columns |c| , l@{ : } , l , and r| . (Of course, the first column may also
begin with a c, l or r.)
A \multicolumn command to span a single column serves to override the
normal entry positioning for that column. The command
\multicolumn{1}{c}{entry}
causes the single-column entry to be centered in its column, regardless of what
positioning the environment’s argument specifies for that column.
Most of these features are illustrated in the grand example of Figure 3.1,
which was produced by the input shown in Figure 3.2. (See Section 2.3 for
an explanation of the $ and ^ , Section 3.2.2 for the \makebox command,
and Section 3.2.2 for the \parbox command.) There should be some more
space at the bottom of the “Gr:” and “Nt:” subcolumns. It can be added by
putting a strut at the end of one of the \parbox arguments. (See page 85 for an
explanation of struts.) When making a complex table like this, you’ll usually
have to add some final touches like that to get it just right.
Warning: Each entry in a tabular or array environment is a separate box.
Declarations are local to the entry in which they appear. More precisely, the
scope of any declaration extends only up to the next & or \\ . No environment
can contain either of these commands unless it contains the entire tabular or
array environment.
\begin{tabular}{||r|c|r||}
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{||c||}{AT\&T Common Stock} \\
\hline
\multicolumn{1}{||c|}{Year} & Price &
\multicolumn{1}{c||}{Dividend} \\
\hline
1973 & 46-51 & \$2.87 \\
\hline
4 & 40-53 & 3.24 \\
\hline
5 & 45-52 & \parbox[t]{.25in}{\raggedright Gr: \\ 3.40}
\vline{}
\parbox[t]{.25in}{\raggedright Nt: \\ 1.73} \\
\hline
6 & 51-59 & .95\makebox[0pt][l]{$^{a}$}\\
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{l}{$^{a}$(first quarter only)}
\end{tabular}
Figure 3.2: Input for a Grand Example.

y
6
1.4 s (2,1.4)
(-1.8,1)
s 1
- x
-1.8 unit - 2
length
Figure 3.3: Points and their coordinates.
3.4.3 The picture Environment

The picture environment allows you to create just about any kind of picture
you want containing text, lines, arrows and circles. You tell LATEX where to
put things in the picture by specifying their coordinates. A coordinate is a
number that may have a decimal point and a minus sign—a number like 5,
2.3 or -3.1416. A coordinate specifies a length in multiples of the unit length
\unitlength, so if \unitlength has been set to 1cm, then the coordinate 2.54
specifies a length of 2.54 centimeters. You can change the value of \unitlength
anywhere you want, using the commands of Section 3.1.2 on page 73, but strange
things will happen if you try changing it inside the picture environment.
A position is a pair of coordinates, such as (2.4,-5), which specifies the
point with x-coordinate 2.4 and y-coordinate -5. Coordinates are specified in
the usual way with respect to an origin, which is normally at the lower-left
corner of the picture. Note that when a position appears as an argument, it is
not enclosed in braces; the parentheses serve to delimit the argument. Figure 3.3
illustrates how points are located by their coordinates.
The picture environment has one mandatory argument, which is a position.
It specifies the size of the picture. The environment produces a rectangular box
with width and height determined by this argument’s x- and y-coordinates.
(Recall the discussion of boxes in Section 1.5.)
The picture environment also has an optional position argument, follow-
ing the size argument, that can change the origin. (Unlike ordinary optional
arguments, this argument is not contained in square brackets.) The optional
argument gives the coordinates of the point at the lower-left corner of the pic-
ture (thereby determining the origin). For example, if \unitlength has been
set to 1mm, the command
\begin{picture}(100,200)(10,20)
produces a picture of width 100 millimeters and height 200 millimeters, whose
lower-left corner is the point (10,20) and whose upper-right corner is therefore
the point (110,220). When you first draw a picture, you will omit the optional
argument, leaving the origin at the lower-left corner. If you then want to mod-
ify your picture by shifting everything, you just add the appropriate optional
argument.
The environment’s mandatory argument determines the nominal size of the
picture. This need bear no relation to how large the picture really is; LATEX will
happily allow you to put things outside the picture, or even off the page. The
picture’s nominal size is used by TEX in determining how much room to leave
for it.
Everything that appears in a picture is drawn by the \put command. The
command
\put (11.3,-.3){ ... }
puts the object specified by “...” in the picture, with its reference point at co-
ordinates (11.3,-.3). The reference points for various objects will be described
below.
The \put command creates an LR box, so you should review the discussion
of LR boxes in Section 3.2.2 on page 81. You can put anything in the text
argument of the put command that you’d put into the argument of an \mbox
and related commands of Section 3.2.2. When you do this, the reference point
will be the lower left corner of the box.
The \makebox command, and the related \framebox and \savebox com-
mands, have special forms designed for use in with pictures. The command
\makebox(20,30){ ... }
forms a box 20 units (multiples of \unitlength) wide and 30 units high. As
with the ordinary \makebox command, there is an optional argument to specify
the position of the object in the box. However, both the vertical and horizontal
positions can be specified. With no argument, the object is centered vertically
and horizontally. An optional argument, following the position argument, can
consist of one or two of the following letters:
t: Moves the item to the top of the rectangle.
b: Moves the item to the bottom.
l: Moves the item to the left.
r: Moves the item to the right.
The letters can appear in either order. When a position isn’t specified, centering
is assumed. Thus,
\put(25,-4.5){\makebox(10,20)[tl]{gnu}}
makes a box of width 10 units and height 20 units, with “gnu” at the top left
corner, and places that box with its lower left corner at coordinate position
(25,-4.5).
The \framebox and \savebox commands are analogous. This version of
\framebox command differs from the ordinary one described in Section 3.2.2 in
two respects:
• No extra \fboxsep space is left between the frame and the box contents.
The command
\framebox(100,30)[r]{gnu}
produces something like
gnu
• The thickness of the lines in the frame is not determined by \fboxrule,

but is equal to the width of line produced by other picture commands, as
described below.
You can use the \savebox command inside or outside a picture environ-
ment; just remember that it’s a declaration with normal scoping rules. It takes
LATEX a long time to draw a pictures, especially if they have slanted lines in
them, so it’s a good idea to use \savebox commands whenever the same ob-
ject appears in different pictures, or in different places within the same picture.
However, a saved box also uses TEX’s valuable memory space, so you should
not save pictures any longer than you need to. The space used by a saved box
is reclaimed when TEX leaves the scope of the \savebox declaration. If you’ve
saved a picture in storage bin 7, you can unsave it, reclaiming its space, with
the command
\sbox7{}
which puts an empty box in bin 7.
There is another command in the \makebox “family” that is designed only
for use in a picture environment. This is the \dashbox command, which draws
a dashed box like
gnu
This was drawn with the command

\dashbox {5}(30,20)[t]{gnu}
y
P
6 PPP 3 -
2.6 PrP
p0 P
P PP
PP 6
PP
PPPPPP
PP 1
PP
PP PP
PPP?PPP
PPPP
r p1
PPPP
PP
4.8 - PPP
-x
1.4
Figure 3.4: \put (1.4,2.6){\line(3,-1){4.8}}
Note that it has an extra argument at the beginning, which specifies the width of
each dash. This command produced a rectangle of width 30 units and height 20
units, drawn with dashed lines, where the length of each dash is 5 units. A
dashed box looks best when the width and the height are both multiples of the
dash length. As with any box, the reference point of the dashed box is its lower
left corner, so a \put(3,-.2) command will put that corner of the box at the
point (3,-.2).
Anything that you could normally put inside an LR box can be used as the
argument for a \put command. In addition, the following objects are designed
especially for use with the \put command.
Lines: The way you’d probably like to draw a line is by specifying the two
endpoints. That would work fine if LATEX could draw a line with any arbitrary
slope. Unfortunately, LATEX can draw lines with a fixed, though large, choice
of slopes. Specifying the endpoints of a line wouldn’t work very well because,
with a fixed collection of slopes, LATEX can’t draw a line through any two
points. Therefore, LATEX provides the following \line command for specifying
the slope and the length of a line. You may find it a little hard getting used
to this command, but it’s the best one I could think of for drawing lines with
LATEX.
You draw a line by writing a command of the form
\put(x0 ,y0 ){\line(x,y){len}}
where (x0 ,y0 ) specifies the starting point, (x,y) specifies the slope, and len
specifies its length, as I’ll now explain. (See Figure 3.4 for an example that
illustrates this explanation.) Let p0 be the point with coordinates (x0 , y0 ).
Starting at p0 , move x units to the right and y units up to find the point p1 . In
other words, p1 has coordinates
(x0 + x, y0 + y)
Note that moving right a distance of −2 units means moving 2 units to the left,
and similarly for a negative vertical distance. The line drawn by this command
will lie along the straight line through p0 and p1 .
The line will start at p0 and go in the direction of p1 . To determine its
length, there are two cases:
x 6= 0: This means that the line is nonvertical. In this case, the line extends len
units of distance horizontally to the right or left of p0 (depending upon
whether x is positive or negative).
x = 0: This means that the line is vertical. In this case, the line extends len
units of distance above or below p0 (depending upon whether y is positive
or negative).
Note that len, which must be a nonnegative number, always specifies a hori-
zontal distance except in the case of a vertical line, in which case the horizontal
distance is zero so you must specify the vertical distance. It equals the length
of the line, as measured along it, only for horizontal and vertical lines.
Since only a fixed number of slopes are available, there are only a limited
number of values that x and y can assume. They must both be integers (numbers
without decimal points) lying between −6 and +6. Moreover, they can’t have
any common divisors bigger than one. In other words, x/y must be a fraction in
its simplest form, so you can’t have x = 2 and y = −4, you must use x = 1 and
y = −2 instead. The following are all illegal arguments of a \line command:
(1.4, 3), (3,6), (0,2), and (1,7).
LATEX draws slanted (neither horizontal nor vertical) lines using a special
typeface whose glyphs consist of small line segments. This means that there is a
smallest slanted line that it can draw—its length is about 10 points, or 1/7-inch.
If you try to draw a smaller slanted line, LATEX will print nothing. Also, since
it has to print lots of line segments to make up a line, LATEX takes a long time
to draw slanted line segments. This doesn’t apply to horizontal or vertical lines,
which can be draw to any length in essentially the same amount of time.
Arrows: LATEX provides a \vector command for drawing arrows, which works
exactly like the \line command. In the notation used to describe the \line
command, the tail of the arrow is at point p0 and the tip of the arrowhead is
at p1 . This is true even if the arrowhead is longer than the distance from p0 to
p1 . In particular, the command
\put(10,20.5){\vector(2,3){0}}
which specifies an arrow of length zero, puts an arrowhead having slope (2,3)
with its tip at the point (10, 20.5). LATEX can’t draw arrows with as many
different slopes as it can lines. The x and y values of the \vector command’s
argument must lie between −4 and +4, inclusive. Remember that, as in the
\line command, the values of x and y that specify the slope must have no
common divisor.
stacks: The \shortstack command produces a stack of objects, just like a

one-column tabular environment. (See Section 3.4.2 for a description of that
environment.) In fact, the command
\shortstack {x \\ yy \\ zzz}
acts pretty much like an abbreviation for
\begin{tabular}[b]{c}
x \\ yy \\ zzz
\end{tabular}
producing
x
yy
zzz
If you look closely, you’ll note that there’s a little less space between the items
than the tabular environment produces, which makes \shortstack better
suited for use in a picture. The \shortstack command normally centers each
item horizontally in the stack. By adding an optional l or r argument, you can
get them to be flushed left or right in the stack, as in
x
yyyy
zzzzzzzz
which I produced by typing

\shortstack[r]{x \\ yyyy \\ zzzzzzzz}
The \shortstack command makes a box. As usual, the reference point of
that box is its lower-left corner, so its the position of this corner that the \put
command specifies. You can use this command outside the picture environment,
but you’ll seldom have any need to.
circles: LATEX provides a \circle command for drawing circles. The command
\put(24,35){\circle{10}}
draws a circle whose diameter is 10 units and whose center is at the point
(24,35). More precisely, its diameter will be as close to 10 units as LATEX can
achieve with the fixed collection of circles that it can draw. At the moment, the
largest circle in its repertoire is '$
&%
but there may be a larger circles available in the version of LATEX that you are
using.
The \circle* command draws solid circles like u . LATEX can’t draw solid
circles as big as its larger open circles, but you’d have little need for such big
solid circles.
Ovals and Curved Corners: An oval is a rectangle with rounded corners. The
command
\put(100,20){\oval(50,30)}
draws an oval 50 units wide and 30 units high, rounding the corners as much as
possible to produce something like

with its center at the point (100,20).

An optional argument allows you to choose any half or quarter of the oval.
For example the command
\put(100,20){\oval(50,30)[tr]}
produces
It is positioned just as before, with the center of the oval at position (100,20).
The optional argument bl would produce the bottom-left quadrant, r would
produce the right half, b the bottom half, and so on. In all cases, the reference
point is the center of the complete oval.
Framing: The \framebox command allows you to put a frame of a fixed size
around an object. However, sometimes you’d like the size of the object to de-
termine the size of the frame. This is what the \fbox command of Section 3.2.2
does, but that command leaves extra space around the object that you usually
don’t want in a picture. LATEX therefore provides the \frame command, which
works very much like the \fbox command except it doesn’t leave any extra
space. Thus, typing
\frame{\shortstack{a \\ b}}
produces
a
b
LATEX provides two standard thicknesses for the lines in a picture—thin and
thick. They are obtained with the declarations \thinlines and \thicklines,
respectively. The default is the thickness specified by \thinlines. LATEX also
allows you to choose the thickness of horizontal and vertical lines yourself with
the \linethickness command. Writing
\linethickness{.4mm}
will make all horizontal and vertical lines .4mm thick. However, it will not
affect the thickness of slanted lines and circles. You will therefore get strange
results if you give an \oval command after setting the line thickness with a
\linethickness command, since the straight lines and the rounded corners may
have different thicknesses. These three commands are ordinary declarations, and
can be used at any time.
There’s one more picture-drawing command that doesn’t provide any new
abilities, but does make some things a lot easier. It is used when you’re putting
the same object in a regular pattern across the picture. The \multiput com-
mand has the following form:
\multiput(x,y)(∆x,∆y){n}{obj }
It is equivalent to the n commands

\put(x,y){obj }
\put(x + ∆x,y + ∆y){obj }
\put(x + 2∆x,y + 2∆y){obj }
...
\put(x + (n − 1)∆x,y + (n − 1)∆y){obj }
Thus, it puts n copies of the specified object into the picture, starting at position
(x, y) and stepping the position by (∆x, ∆y) units each time. Don’t use a
\multiput with n greater than about 100, or TEX may run out of room.
That’s all there is to it, so you can let your creative imagination run wild.
Before you do, I will offer some advice based upon my experience. I suggest
using a small unit length, like a 1pt or 1mm, so you seldom have to worry about
decimals. You should lay out your figure on “graph” paper, so you know how
everything fits. However, if I’m connecting things with lines or arrows, I find
it best to determine the actual positions of objects by calculation rather than
from the picture. For example if I draw a box with
\put(100,20){\framebox(30,15){...}}
and want to draw an arrow from the middle of its right side, then a simple
calculation shows that I should have
\put(130,27.5){\vector ...}
This type of calculation is especially important because of the limited choice of
line slopes that LATEX provides. When using slanted lines, I find myself basing
the positions of boxes upon where slanted lines can go.
3.4.4 The list Environment

LATEX uses a general list environment to define most of the paragraph-making
environments of Section 2.2. The list environment produces a list of items,
each of which is begun by the \item command described in Section 2.2.2 on
page 37.
The list environment has two arguments. The first specifies how items
should be labeled when no argument is given to the \item command. This
argument is a piece of text that is inserted in a box to form the label. The text
is normally left-justified in the box, but you can change that by inserting one
or more \hfill commands, as described in Section 3.2.1.
Items are numbered by using the list counter, which is incremented by
every \item command that does not have an argument. See Section 3.1.3 on
page 76 for an explanation of how to generate numbers from a counter. For
example, writing
\begin{list}{(\alph{list})}{...}
creates a list whose items are labeled (a), (b), etc.
The second argument of the list environment contains commands to
change the spacing parameters for the list. When this argument is evaluated,
the spacing parameters have been given default values. Any spacing parameters
not changed by the commands in this argument will retain their default values.
The spacing parameters are all length commands, which can be changed by the
commands of Section 3.1.2 on page 73. Below is a list of these parameters.
\topsep: The extra vertical space inserted between the first list item and the
preceding paragraph. If the list environment is preceded by a blank
line, then its default value is the value of \topsep in the surrounding
environment. At the outermost document environment, \topsep equals
\parskip, one of the parameters described in Section 3.5.3. If the list
environment is not preceded by a blank line, then the default value is
\topsepcorrection times the value of \topsep of the enclosing environ-
ment. The parameter \topsepcorrection is a number such as .75 or 1,
and can be changed by the \renewcommand command of Section 3.1.1.
\itemsep: The extra vertical space between successive list items. Its default
value is the same as for \topsep.
\parsep: The extra vertical space between paragraphs within an item. Its de-
fault value is the smaller of the following two lengths: \parsep of the
enclosing environment and the default value of \topsep. At the outer-
most document environment, the value of \parsep equals the value of
\parskip.1
1 There is actually some extra “stretchiness” in \parskip that is not in \parsep, but that
shouldn’t concern you.

\leftmargin: The horizontal distance between the left margin of the enclosing
environment and the left margin of the list. It must be nonnegative. Its
default value depends upon the nesting level of the list environment. For
an outermost list, the default value is \leftmargini, for the next level it’s
\leftmarginii, and so on up to \leftmarginvi. Lists can be nested at
most six levels deep. You can change the values of \leftmargini through
\leftmarginvi at any time, but the sensible place to do so is before the
\begin{document} command. Note that changing these values will affect
the itemize and enumerate environments as well.
\rightmargin: The horizontal distance between the right margin of the enclos-
ing environment and the right margin of the list. It must be nonnegative.
Its default value is 0in.
\listparindent: The amount of extra indentation added to the first line of
every paragraph of an item after the first. It is not added to the the first
line of the item. Labeled lists usually have listparindent equal to 0cm,
which is its default value. Note that its value may be negative.
\itemindent: The amount of extra indentation added to the beginning of each
item. This indentation is added before the label. Its default value is 0mm.
\labelsep: The space between the end of the label box and the text of the item.
It may be negative. Its default value is determined by the document style.
\labelwidth: The normal width of the box that contains the label. It must
be nonnegative. Its default value is \leftmargin−\labelsep—in other
words, just large enough so the left edge of the label box is flush with the
left margin of the enclosing environment.
Note that the distance between the bottom of the list and the following
text is not specified by any parameter. If there is no blank line following the
\end{list}, then the vertical space below the list will be the same as the
vertical space above it. If there is a blank line following the \end{list}, then
the interparagraph space of the enclosing environment is used.
The item’s label is normally placed in a box of width \labelwidth, with its
right edge a distance of \labelsep to the left of the item’s left margin. However,
if the label is wider than \labelwidth, then it will be placed in a larger box,
and the box allowed to extend further than normal to the right. In other words,
the left edge of the box will be a distance \labelwidth+\labelsep to the left
of the item’s left margin, and there will be a \labelsep space to the right of
the label.
You can define your own paragraph-making environment with the \newlist
command. A command of the form
\newlist{mylist}{larg1 }{larg2 }{iarg}
defines a \begin{mylist} command to be equivalent to

\begin {list}{larg1 }{larg2 }iarg
and makes \end{mylist} synonymous with \end{list}. The iarg argument is
most often used to add an \item command to the beginning.
Every one of LATEX’s paragraph-making environments that indents the mar-
gin is defined in terms of the list environment. For example, the quote envi-
ronment, in which paragraphs are unindented and the right margin is indented
the same as the left can be defined as follows.
\newlist{quote}{}{\setlength{\rightmargin}%
{\leftmargin}}{\item[]}
(Remember the use of % to start a new line without adding a space, as explained
in Section 1.3 on page 8.) The verse environment uses negative values for
\itemindent and \listparindent. The right combination of parameters will
provide any kind of list-making environment you’re likely to want.
3.4.5 Verbatim
The verbatim environment is a paragraph-making environment that gets LATEX
to print exactly what you type in. For example, typing
produces the following:
\begin{verbatim}
Look, Ma!
Special characters:
% $ & # \ ~ ^ _ { }
\end{verbatim}
produces the following:
Look, Ma!
Special characters:
% $ & # \ ~ ^ _ { }

The verbatim environment turns LATEX into a typewriter, with and
characters having the same effect that they would on a typewriter. Every char-
acter in a verbatim environment produces itself; even the \ acts like an ordi-
nary printing character. The only thing that you can’t put inside a verbatim
environment is the character string
\end{verbatim}
There’s also a \verb command that typesets its argument in “verbatim
mode”. For example, a sentence like this one containing \#{}$% can be typed
as
... this one containing \verb+\#{}$%+ can be ...

In this example, the argument of the \verb command is \#{}$% , the +’s serving
to delimit the argument. You can use any ordinary printing character instead
of + to delimit the argument. (See page 6 in Section 1.1 if you don’t remember
what the ordinary printing characters are.)
The verbatim environment and the \verb command have *-forms that differ
only in that they cause a space to print like “ ” instead of just leaving a blank
space. For example, I can print {x + y} by typing
\verb*"{x + y}"
Be careful to include the \end{verbatim} or matching argument delimiter

for the \verb command. If you forget it, LATEX may process the rest of your
document, including the \end{document}, as part of the verbatim text. Need-
less to say, the result would be disastrous.
Warning: You cannot put a verbatim environment or a \verb command in
an argument of any other command. For example,
\mbox{x + \verb"\verb!${}#!" + y} is wrong
won’t work right.
Warning: A tab character is not the same as a space in a verbatim or \verb

command. Also, you should not put a in the argument of a \verb command.
3.5 Changing the Style

Many aspects of the way LATEX formats your document can be “tweaked” by
commands to choose different style options and to change parameters. This
section describes how it’s done.
3.5.1 The Page Layout and Document Style

Recall that your document begins with a \pagelayout command followed by
a \documentstyle command. The \pagelayout command defines the page
layout—where things are placed on the page. A page of output consists of three
units: the head, the text and the foot. The head and foot are used for page
numbers and various things that people like to put at the top and bottom of
pages, such as the title of the current chapter. The text consists of everything
that comes directly from your manuscript file, including figures and footnotes.
The pagelayout command specifies the size of each of these three units and
where they go on the page. It determines the size of the \textwidth and
\textheight lengths, which are the dimensions of the text on the page. (See
Section 3.1.2.)
The argument of the \pagelayout command consists of the name of the

chosen layout plus one or more options, separated by commas. Executing the
command causes LATEX to read a special command file that sets the appropriate
parameters. The normal page layout will be on a file named normal.plo on
some system directory. If you can find a copy of this file, browsing through it
might be informative.
The standard version of most page layouts is designed for documents that will
be printed on just one side of the paper. Most formats have a twoside option
for documents that are printed on both sides, like real books. For example, the
command
\pagelayout{normal,twoside}
selects the normal page layout with the twoside option.
After your \pagelayout command comes the \documentstyle command
to specify the document style. I’ve already discussed the standard document
styles. The command
causes LATEX to read a file named article.sty from a system directory, which
is a special command file that sets certain parameters and defines some style-
specific commands, such as sectioning commands. This file is of interest only to
confirmed TEX hackers; ordinary people should not attempt to look at it.
Like page layouts, document styles can have options. The 11pt and 12pt
style options, which choose an 11-point and 12-point type size, are discussed in
Section 2.1.2 on page 30. You should check with your local expert to find out
what other options are available.
3.5.2 Page Styles

The page layout determines the size and position of the page’s head and foot.
The page style determines what goes in them. The page style changes at various
points in a document. For example, the title page has no page number, and the
first page of a chapter has a different head and foot from the rest of the text.
Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about these changes; LATEX handles them
automatically. However, there are certain points in the manuscript, usually
when you’re beginning a new part of the document, where you may want to
tell LATEX to change the page style—for example, when you begin the table of
contents or go from the introduction to the main body of the text. Also, you
can override LATEX’s choice of page style if you disagree with it.
The \pagestyle and \thispagestyle commands are used to change the
page style. They are the same except that the \pagestyle command changes
the style from the current page on, while \thispagestyle changes it only for
the current page, reverting afterwards to the style specified by the preceding
\pagestyle command. However, be careful if you execute a style-changing

command in the middle of a page, because you and TEX may have different
ideas about what the “current page” is when it is processing your command. You
will seldom have any trouble, though, if you put the style-changing command
between paragraphs, with a blank line before and after it.
The argument of the \pagestyle or \thispagestyle command specifies
the page style. What page styles are available will depend upon the document
style. Below are some standard options that will be available in many document
styles.
plain: Just a plain page number.

empty: Produces empty heads and feet—no page number.
headings: Puts running headings on each page. The document style speci-
fies what goes in the headings; there may be other options that provide
different kinds of headings.
myheadings: You specify what is to go in the heading. The command
\head{Gnus} tells LATEX to make “Gnus” the text of the heading. For
two-sided printing, you can give an optional l or r argument to indicate
that the heading should go on the left- or right-hand page. Thus,
\head[l]{Gnats} \head[r]{Gnus}
will make “Gnats” the heading on left-hand pages and “Gnus” the heading
on right-hand pages.
These commands change the heading starting with the current page. They
specify only the text of the headings; the document style determines the
type style and where the page number goes.
Warning: The restrictions on what can go into the optional argument of
a sectioning command, described in Section 2.5.1 on page 66, apply to the
argument of a \head command.
Remember that the pagestyle command changes the style starting with
the current page. If you want the headings page style to begin after the intro-
duction, starting with the first chapter, then the correct sequence of commands
is:
... ending our introduction.
\newpage
\pagestyle{headings}
\chapter{Armadillos I Have Known}
The \chapter command may need to know what page style is in effect in order
to set up the headings, so it is preceded by the \pagestyle command. The
headings page style won’t take effect until the second page of the chapter
because \chapter executes a \thispagestyle command that takes precedence.
Although the document style determines where the page number goes, you
get to decide what the number looks like. The \pagenumbering command allows
you to change the numbering style and reset the page number to one. You can
write
\pagenumbering{arabic}
for arabic numbering and

\pagenumbering{roman}
for Roman numerals. Section 3.1.3 provides additional options.
3.5.3 Style Parameters

In this section are listed all the style parameters that you might want to use or
change, except some that are described elsewhere. They are all lengths, unless
otherwise specified. Any restrictions on where they can be changed are stated;
otherwise they can be changed at will. The phrase “initial declaration only”
means that the parameter can be changed only before the \begin{document}
command.
Remember that a length which TEX regards as one inch may not appear as
exactly one inch on the printed page. The output device may provide a uniform
magnification of all lengths.
Page Layout Parameters

The parameters that specify distances from the physical edge of the page should
not be taken literally, since they measure the distance from where TEX thinks
the physical edge of the page should be, not where your output device thinks it
is.
\topmargin: The distance from the top of the physical page to the pages’s head.
Initial declaration only.
\oddsidemargin: The distance between the left side of the page and the text’s
normal left margin. For two-sided printing (specified by the twoside
page-layout option), it applies only to odd-numbered (right-hand) pages,
otherwise it applies to all pages. Initial declaration only.
\evensidemargin: Same as \oddsidemargin except used for even-numbered
pages in two-sided printing. Initial declaration only.
\headheight: Height of the head—the box at the top of the page that holds
the running head. Initial declaration only.
\headsep: The vertical distance between the bottom of the head and the top
of the text. Initial declaration only.
\footheight: Height of the foot—the box at the bottom of the page that may
hold the page number. Initial declaration only.
\footskip: The vertical distance between the bottom of the last line of text and
the bottom of the foot. Note difference between \footskip and \headsep.
\textheight: The height of the text on the page, excluding the head and foot.
\textwidth: The normal width of the text. Initial declaration only.
\columnwidth: The width of the current column. In single-column text it
equals \textwidth, but it will be different in two-column text. Do not
change.
\columnsep: The distance between the two columns in two-column text. It can
be changed before the \begin{document} command, or before a command
that switches from one-column to two-column style.
\columnseprule: The width of the rule between columns on two-column pages.
Its normal value is zero.
\footnotesep: The height of a strut placed at the beginning of every footnote.
(See page 85 of Section 3.2.2 for a discussion of struts.)
\marginparwidth: The width of a marginal note.
\marginparsep: The horizontal space between the margin and the marginal
note.
\marginparpush: The minimum amount of vertical space that LATEX will leave
between two marginal notes.
Float Parameters
The following parameters are the float-placement constraints mentioned in Sec-
tion 2.4.2. Changes made to these parameters before the
\begin{document} command apply from the first page on. Changes made after
the \begin{document} take effect on the next page, not the current one.
topnumber: The maximum number of floats allowed at the top of a page. This
is a counter, so it can be changed by the commands of Section 3.1.3.
\topfraction: The maximum fraction of the page that can be occupied by

floats at the top of the page. The value .25 specifies that the top quarter of
the page may be devoted to floats. It is changed with the \renewcommand
command of Section 3.1.1.
bottomnumber: Same as topnumber except for the bottom of the page.
\bottomfraction: Same as \topfraction except for the bottom of the page.
totalnumber: The maximum number of floats that can appear on a single page,
irrespective of their positions. It is a counter.
\textfraction: The minimum fraction of a text page that must be devoted to
text. The other 1 − \textfraction fraction may be occupied by floats.
It is changed with \renewcommand.
\floatpagefraction: The minimum fraction of a float page that must be oc-
cupied by floats. This limits the amount of blank space allowed on a float
page. It is changed with the \renewcommand command.
dbltopnumber: The analogue of topnumber for two-column floats (in two-col-
umn style).
\dbltopfraction: The dbltopnumber analogue of \topfraction for two-col-
umn floats.
\dblfloatpagefraction: The analogue of \floatpagefraction for two-col-
umn float pages.
The following parameters control the space left between and around floats.
Their values are rubber lengths, so you should not change them unless you’ve
read Chapter 12 of The TEXbook. You can effectively change their values by
controlling the amount of space you put in each float.
\floatsep: The distance between floats that appear at the top or bottom of a
text page.
\textfloatsep: The distance between the floats appearing at the top or bot-
tom of a page and the text on that page.
\intextsep: The vertical space placed above and below a float that is put in
the middle of the text with the h float-placement option.
\dblfloatsep: Same as \floatsep except for double-width floats on a two-
column page.
\dbltextfloatsep: Same as \textfloatsep except for double-width floats on
a two-column page.
Paragraph-Making Parameters
See also the parameters used by the list environment, described in Section 3.4.4.
\parskip: The extra vertical space added between paragraphs. It should be a

“rubber” length, so don’t try changing it unless you have read Chapter 12
of The TEXbook.
\parindent: The horizontal indentation added at the beginning of a paragraph.

\baselineskip: The normal distance from the bottom of one line of a para-
graph to the bottom of the next line. Should only be changed locally. If
you want to change its value for the entire document, see \mainbaselineskip.
\mainbaselineskip: The value of baselineskip for the \normalsize type
size. Should be changed only before the \begin{document} command.
\parstretch: A “rubber” length whose natural length is zero. It is used to
provide the vertical stretch between paragraphs and items in a list. Don’t
change it unless you’ve read Chapter 12 of The TEXbook.
\linewidth: The width of the current line. It will differ from \columnwidth
only when inside a list environment, or one of the environments defined
in terms of the list environment.
Box Parameters
\fboxrule: The thickness of the lines in the frame produced by the \framebox
and \fbox commands.
\fboxsep: The space between the frame and the text that it’s framing in the
\framebox and \fbox commands.
Table of Contents Parameters

\begintableofcontents: A command that produces the heading for a table
of contents. It must include all the necessary formatting commands. It is
changed with the \renewcommand command of Section 3.1.1.
\beginlistoffigures: The analogue of \begintableofcontents for the list

of figures.
\beginlistoftables: The analogue of \begintableofcontents for the list of
tables.
tabbing, tabular, and array

\tabbingsep: The distance to the left of a tab stop moved by the tabbing
environment’s \’ command.
\arraycolsep: Half the width of the space left between columns in an array
environment.
\tabcolsep: Half the width of the space left between columns in a tabular
environment.
\arrayrulewidth: The width of the rule created in a tabular or array envi-
ronment by a | in the argument, an \hline command, and a \vline
command.
\doublerulesep: The horizontal distance between the two vertical rules cre-
ated by a || in the argument of a tabular or array environment.
3.6 Using Raw TEX

With LATEX, you can format things any way you like, but it may not be as easy
as you’d like. LATEX will print a recipe exactly the way you want it, but it
may not allow you to define a \recipe command that does it all automatically.
For that, you may have to delve into The TEXbook and learn to use the more
primitive TEX commands. However, before you do that, be sure it’s worth it.
You can format a lot of recipes in the time it takes you to learn how to write
that \recipe command.
LATEX has been carefully planned so its commands fit together into a single
system. Many compromises have been made to ensure that a command will
work properly when used in any reasonable way with other LATEX commands.
It may not work properly when used with raw TEX commands. Every effort will
be made to correct errors found in LATEX. However, I will not even look at an
error unless every command in the input that produced it is either listed in the
index of this manual or defined using a command listed in the index. In other
words, you’re on your own when you use raw TEX.
Now that I’ve disclaimed all responsibility, I’ll give you some idea of what
you can do without getting into trouble. A good general rule is not to mix LATEX
commands with plain TEX commands. More precisely, you shouldn’t combine
a LATEX command with any TEX commands that might modify parameters it
uses. For example, it would be foolish to think you could use a TEX \hangindent
command or modify \hsize inside one of LATEX’s list environments.
You should not modify any parameters that are used by LATEX’s \output
routine, except as specified in this manual. In particular, you should forget
about most of what’s in Chapter 15 of The TEXbook. However, LATEX does
obey all of TEX’s conventions for the allocation of registers, so you can define
your own counts, boxes, etc. with the normal TEX commands.
Most of the TEX commands described in The TEXbook have been retained in
LATEX, even though they may not officially be part of LATEX. The exceptions are
commands used only in TEX’s standard \output routine, and certain commands
that have been replaced by more powerful LATEX commands, such as the tabbing
commands in Chapter 22 of The TEXbook. A few TEX commands have been
displaced by LATEX commands of the same name—for example LATEX’s \end
command is completely different from TEX’s. There are also a few of TEX’s
commands that have been given slightly different definitions. For example,
LATEX’s \input command works with the LATEX convention of enclosing its
argument in braces, as well as with the TEX convention of omitting the braces.
Chapter 4
Two-Column Text
Normally, LATEX produces one- theindex environment. The \chapter

column output, like you’ve seen in all command also makes a two-column-
the preceding chapters of this manual. wide chapter title.
LATEX also can generate a two-column The command \onecolumn is
format like the one used in this chap- the inverse declaration, executing a
ter. There is a twocolumn document \clearpage command and producing
style option that you should use if your one-column output.
entire document is going to be in a two- LATEX does everything pretty
column format. You can also print just much the same when producing two-
part of your document in two-column column output as when producing one-
style by using the \twocolumn com- column output. The handling of fig-
mand. ures and tables in two-column format
The \twocolumn declaration is discussed in Section 2.4.2 on page 64.
causes LATEX to start a new page and Marginal notes are handled in the obvi-
begin producing two-column output. ous way, since there’s only one margin
More precisely, the \twocolumn com- where the note may appear.
mand executes the \clearpage com- The page-breaking commands de-
mand described in Section 3.3.3, which scribed in Section 3.3.3 on page 90
prints all outstanding figures and ta- work differently in two-column format,
bles before starting the new page. the \newpage and \pagebreak com-
The \twocolumn command has an mands starting new columns rather
optional argument for producing a full- than new pages. format. However, the
page-wide heading at the top of the \clearpage and \cleardoublepage
new page. The argument is typeset in commands begin new pages as usual.
a two-column-wide parbox. Thus, you When you do a \clearpage in
could reproduce the formatting of the two-column format, LATEX does not
first page of the index, page ??, with even out the columns for you.1 If you
the command want the columns on a partially-filled
1 This this would be very difficult because
\twocolumn[\large INDEX]
there might be footnotes or other migrating
Of course, that’s done for you by the text on the page.
120
CHAPTER 4. TWO-COLUMN TEXT 121
page to be the same height, you’ll have needn’t worry about them if your en-
to insert a \newpage command in the tire document is in two-column format.
appropriate place. If the column break
should come inside a paragraph, you’ll
have to do some fiddling. The new
column should start with a \noindent
command to suppress the paragraph
indentation. The easiest way to make
sure that the last line is filled out to the
right margin is to put an \hfill com-
mand between every word on the last
line. (See Section 3.2.1 for an explana-
tion of this command.) Needless to say,
this is something you should do only
when producing the very final output.
LATEX puts a vertical line between
the columns in two-column format.
This width is the value of the length
command \columnseprule, which is
normally zero, making the line invis-
ible. You can use the commands of
Section 3.1.2 to set it to a nonzero
value. However, LATEX always extends
this line to the bottom of the page, re-
gardless of how long the columns are.
This will look funny, and probably re-
quire manual touching up, if the text
doesn’t go all the way to the bottom of
the page.
The \twocolumn command does
not change any document-style para-
meters. Some parameters, like the
paragraph indentation, may have to
be changed for two-column format.
See Section 3.5.3 on page 114 for a
list of all possibly relevant parameters.
TEX will also have a hard time find-
ing good places to break lines when
the lines are so short, so you’ll prob-
ably want to use the \sloppy dec-
laration, described in Section 3.3.2,
when producing two-column output.
The twocolumn document-style option
makes all these changes for you, so you
Chapter 5
Getting Bigger
A large document presents problems to both you and your reader. In prepar-
ing the document, you have the problem of breaking it into manageable pieces.
Your reader has the problem of finding his way around the document. LATEX
helps solve your problem with commands that incorporate a number of different
files into a single document, and allow you to choose which of them to process
on any single execution of LATEX. It helps solve your reader’s problem by pro-
viding commands for cross-referencing—letting one part of the document point
to another. You’ve probably noticed the many cross-references of the form
see Section 2.4.1 on page 57.
There are are two other kinds of cross-references used in this manual: indexing
and bibliographic citation. All the numbers in these cross-references—section,
page and citation numbers—were generated by LATEX using commands de-
scribed in this chapter.
The following sections describe how to break your document into parts and
how to produce the various forms of cross-referencing. Section 5.5 describes
exactly how this is done, and explains why things work the way they do. You
should consult this section if any surprises occur when using these features.
Another feature that is especially useful for large documents is the ability
to interact with LATEX while it is processing your input. Section 5.6 describes
how this is done.
5.1 Doing it in Parts

A large document requires a large amount of input. It is inefficient to handle
this input as a single large file; it’s much better to split it into several smaller
files. LATEX provides two ways in which you can do this. Regardless of how
122
CHAPTER 5. GETTING BIGGER 123
many separate files you use, there is always one file that is the main file. This is
the file whose name you give to LATEX—the one we’ve been calling myfile.tex.
The simplest way to split your input into different files is with the \input
command. The command
\input{gnu}
in your main file causes LATEX to insert the contents of the file gnu.tex right
at the current spot in your manuscript.1 LATEX acts as if the \input{gnu}
command were removed from the main file and replaced by the contents of the
file gnu.tex. Of course, LATEX doesn’t actually change your input files. The
file gnu.tex could also contain an \input command, calling another file that
could contain another \input command, and so on.
In addition to allowing you to split your input into convenient-sized chunks,
the \input command also makes it easy to use the same input in two or more
documents. Although you’ll seldom recycle text in this way, you might develop
a library of declarations that you use in many different documents. As you
develop your own style of using LATEX, you’ll define a number of commands
that you use in all your documents. You can write a single file, perhaps called
mycmds.tex, containing the \newcommand declarations (see Section 3.1.1) that
define these commands, as well as any other declarations you always use, and
then put an \input{mycmds} command in every main file. The file mycmds.tex
can even include the \pagelayout and \documentstyle commands, and you
can begin your main file with \input{mycmds}.
In the course of preparing a document, you’ll often find yourself changing
only small parts of it and wishing you could get LATEX to produce only those
pages that had changed, without having to process the entire input file again.
With a little care, it’s possible to get LATEX to process any single page of your
document by itself. This involves using the \noindent command of Section 1.3,
the page-breaking commands of Section 3.3.3, and the renumbering commands
of Section 3.1.3. (You’ll also want to use the \nofiles command of Section 5.5
when you do this.)
It would be nice if LATEX could do all that for you, allowing you to process
only the page containing the changes. LATEX can’t because, in general, it’s not
possible. Adding one word to the first page could force the last word from that
page onto the following page, creating a ripple effect that changes every page
in the document. However, LATEX does provide a mechanism for splitting your
manuscript into pieces and processing the pieces separately as you revise them.
The \include command works like the \input command described above
in that the command
\include{gnu}
1 To maintain compatibility with standard TEX, LATEX allows you to leave out the braces
around the file name, but there’s no good reason to do so.
tells LATEX that the file gnu.tex should be inserted here. However, it’s possible
to tell LATEX not to process the file gnu.tex, but to step all the counters it
uses for numbering things, so subsequent text is processed as if file gnu.tex had
been processed. (See Section 3.1.3 on page 76 for a discussion of counters.)
To process only part of your document, you put an \includeonly command
in your main file, before the \begin{document} command. The argument of the
\includeonly command is a list of file names, which are the only \include’d
files that LATEX will process. Suppose your input file contains the command
\includeonly{gnu,gnat,gnash}
When LATEX comes to the command
\include{gnat}
it will read in the file gnat.tex as usual. However, when it comes to the
command
\include{rmadlo}
it will not read the file rmadlo.tex because rmadlo was not in the argument
of the \includeonly command. Instead, LATEX will increment all appropriate
counters so the following text will be treated exactly as if the file rmadlo had
been processed. Section 5.6 on page 132 describes how you can get LATEX to ask
you what files to include, so you don’t have to keep changing the \includeonly
command in your main file.
This sounds too good to be true, and it is. LATEX can’t perform magic, and
the following restrictions apply to the \include command.
1. The text in the \include’d file and the text that follows the \include
command must begin on new pages. More precisely, LATEX executes a
\clearpage command (described in Section 3.3.3) immediately before and
after executing the \include command. (Remember that two \clearpage
commands in a row are the same as a single one, so \include’ing an empty
file is equivalent to executing a single
\clearpage.) You will usually put one or more complete chapters on
a single \include’d file.
2. An \include’d file must not contain an \include statement. Thus, if
your input file has an
\include{gnu}
command, then the file gnu.tex may not contain any \include com-
mands. However, gnu.tex may contain \input commands.
3. An \include command may not precede the \begin{document} com-
mand.
Remember that everything in your main file is always processed. If your

main file does not have an \includeonly command, then all the \include’d
files are processed. If your main file contains the command
\includeonly{}
then all \include’d files are skipped. The \includeonly command has no
effect on \input commands; an \input command always causes the specified
file to be processed. (Of course, an \input in an \include’d file is executed
only if that file is processed.)
Warning: Don’t put any spaces in the argument of an \include or \includeonly
command.
LATEX doesn’t perform magic, so it can’t know how many page or section
numbers to skip for a file it has never processed it. LATEX uses a very simple
algorithm for setting its counters when it skips an \include’d file, and it can
produce incorrect numbering. A complete explanation of this algorithm is given
in Section 5.5 on page 130. A simple description of how it works is contained
in the following example. Suppose your main file contains
\include{gnus}
\chapter{Gnats}
and has an \includeonly command that doesn’t include gnu, so LATEX will skip
this \include’d file. Suppose also that the last time LATEX actually processed
the file gnu.tex, the output it produced ended in Chapter 5 on page 37. The
\chapter{gnats} command will then begin Chapter 6 on page 38. This will be
true even though you’ve added several chapters that produced 47 more pages
of output before the \include command.
LATEX will correctly skip over \include’d files so long as an \include’d file
is always reprocessed whenever there is any change to the document before that
\include statement. Of course, the only changes that matter are ones that can
affect the numbering. Minor modifications that don’t add or delete chapters
and don’t change the number of pages cause no problems.
What you’ll probably find is that when you’re working on a large manu-
script, you’ll make each chapter a separate part. In the early drafts, you’ll
be satisfied with seeing each chapter by itself and won’t worry about getting
the page numbers to match properly. At some point, you’ll put it all together
and process the whole manuscript. Then, you’ll work on individual chapters,
processing each one separately. Since it takes a long time for LATEX to process a
long manuscript, you’ll keep processing individual chapters by themselves until
the numbering gets too far out of line, whereupon you’ll run LATEX on the entire
document.
5.2 Index and Glossary

Creating an index or a glossary is not easy, and no completely automatic system
will do a very good job of it. LATEX doesn’t even try; all it does is write a file
containing the information you’ll need to do it yourself. If your input file is
myfile.tex, then the index information will be written on the file myfile.idx.
When you want an item to appear in the index, you write a command like
\index{A. A. Dillo}
in the text to which the index entry should point. If LATEX decides to produce
an index file for you, it will write the line
\indexentry{A. A. Dillo}{37}
on the .idx file, telling you that the item appeared on page 37. If the item
appears on page xxxvii, it will write
\indexentry{A. A. Dillo}{xxxvii}
The \index command does not produce any text. If you want to index an
appearance of the word “gnat”, you’ll have to type something like
gnat\index{gnat}
See Section 3.1.1 on page 71 to find out how you can avoid having to type gnat
twice.
Although you’ll be putting \index commands in your document as you write
it, you won’t want to produce an index until the document is finished. LATEX
won’t write an .idx file unless you put a \makeindex command in your input
file. This command should go before the \begin{document}. Section 5.5 on
page 130 describes in more detail exactly when the .idx file is produced.
LATEX provides the theindex environment to make an index for you. This
environment produces two-column pages, as described in Chapter 4. Each
main index entry is begun by an \item command. A subentry is begun with
\subitem, and a subsubentry is begun with \subsubitem. Thus, a complex
entry might look like
\item gnus 24, 37, 233
\subitem good, 38, 234
\subsubitem very, 235
\subitem bad, 39, 236
Blank lines between entries are ignored. An extra vertical space is produced
by the \indexspace command, which is usually put before the first entry start-
ing with a new letter.
The procedure for making a glossary is completely analogous. Instead of the
\index command you use a \glossary command, and instead of \makeindex
you write \makeglossary. The glossary file is named myfile.glo instead of

myfile.idx, and LATEX writes \glossaryentry instead of \indexentry. How-
ever, there is no environment for glossaries that corresponds to the theindex
environment. You’ll have to format the glossary yourself.
5.3 Cross References

When I tell you to see the discussion of ordinary printing characters on page 6 in
Section 1.1, you can be sure that if you turn to page 6 you’ll find that discussion
there. This is because you’re not depending upon my care in getting things right,
but on LATEX’s automatic cross-referencing facility.
I began the preceding paragraph with
... characters on page~\pageref{ordinary-char} in
Section~\ref{ordinary-char}, you can be sure ...
In Section 1.1, in input that produced the discussion of ordinary printing char-
acters on page 6, there appeared the command
\label{ordinary-char}
The \pageref command produces the page number where the corresponding
\label command occurred, and the \ref produces the section number. (See
Section 1.3 for an explanation of what the ~ is doing there.)
The argument of the \label command can be any string of ordinary printing
characters. As usual, upper-case and lower-case letters are considered to be
different characters; \ref{gnu} does not refer to \label{Gnu}. It’s safest to
stick to a single case, either upper or lower, for all your labels.
You can use the \ref command to refer to anything that LATEX numbers
for you, such as equations and item numbers. The \label command causes
its argument to label the innermost numbered environment that contains it.
Thus, if you put a \label{gnu} command inside Theorem 2.7, then \ref{gnu}
produces “2.7”, and if you put it inside item 3(b) of an enumeration, then the
\ref command produces “3(b)”. If the \label command is not within any
numbered environment, then it labels the most recent \chapter, \section,
\subsection, or \subsubsection command.
As explained in Section 2.4.2, it is the \caption command that numbers a
figure or table. To label a figure or table, you should put the \label command
inside the figure or table environment, right after the caption.
A \ref or \pageref command can precede the corresponding \label com-
mand. LATEX accomplishes this by writing the information it needs on an auxil-
iary file having the extension .aux. If your main file is named myfile.tex, then
LATEX will produce an auxiliary file named myfile.aux. Moreover, for every
\include’d file gnu.tex, it will generate an auxiliary file named gnu.aux. (See
Section 5.1 above for a discussion of \include’d files.)
A \ref or \pageref command always produces the numbers that were right
the last time the corresponding \label command was processed. If the input
has been changed, then these may not be the correct values. When it’s wrapping
things up, LATEX will type a warning message if an incorrect number may have
been produced by a \ref or \pageref command. If you receive this warning,
you must run your file through LATEX again to get things right. In practice,
when putting the finishing touches on a document, the last few changes you
make will seldom change any cross references, so you’ll hardly ever have to
make an extra pass just for the cross references. LATEX also warns you about
undefined and multiply-defined labels.
If you work hard at it, you can create a \label and corresponding \pageref
that LATEX cannot handle correctly. The probability of doing that by accident
is too small to worry about.
The \nofiles command, described in Section 5.5 below, suppresses the
writing of the auxiliary files. However, LATEX always tries to read your .aux
file, and produces a warning message if it doesn’t find it. This was the cause of
the
No file myfile.aux.
message we saw in our example on page 25 of Section 1.7.
Since LATEX makes cross referencing so easy, you may be tempted to go
overboard. Each \label command uses up some of TEX’s string space, so it’s a
good idea to label only what you actually reference. Remember also that page
references are rare in technical documents; they are used in this manual to help
you browse through it without reading the whole thing.
When using symbolic names for cross-referencing, it’s easy to forget what
name you’ve assigned to a section or figure. You can generate a list of your
symbolic names and what they refer to by running LATEX with a special input
file named lablst.tex. This file will be on some system directory, and you’ll
have to consult a local expert to find out how to run LATEX on it. When LATEX
processes the lablst file, it will ask you to type in the name of the input file
whose cross-references you want listed, and the name of the document style used
by that file.
5.4 Bibliographies and Citations

To produce the citation [?], I typed
\cite{knuth-tex82}
The argument of the \cite can be any string of ordinary printing characters.
(See page 6 in Section 1.1 to find out which the ordinary printing characters
are.) I also had to tell LATEX that knuth-tex82 should refer to The TEXbook,
giving it all the information appearing in the bibliography entry on page ??.
Eventually, it will be possible to put your bibliography information into one

or more bibliography database files. Putting the command
\bibliography{mamls,gnats}
will cause the bibliography to appear at that point, with the information to
construct the bibliography coming from the database files named mamls.bib
and gnats.bib. If the command \cite{Knuth:gnus} appears in your text,
then an entry labeled Knuth:gnus must appear in one of these two database
files.
This automatic bibliography feature will work as follows. Suppose your
input file is named myfile.tex. (If your input is split into several files, as de-
scribed in Section 5.1, this is the main file.) When LATEX processes the input,
it records the argument of every \cite command as well as the argument of the
\bibliography command on the .aux file or files it produces. (See Section 5.5
for a complete discussion of .aux files.) When you’re ready to produce the bib-
liography, you will run a special program called BIBTEX, which will produce a
file named myfile.bbl containing the LATEX input that generates the bibliog-
raphy. The next time you run LATEX on your file myfile.tex, executing the
\bibliography command will cause LATEX to read in the file myfile.bbl and
produce the bibliography.
The format of the bibliography database files will be described in a later
edition of this manual. It will be compatible with the format used by Scribe for
its .bib files [?]. A database file will consist of a set of reference entries, each
one containing the data needed to create a bibliography entry—author, title,
year of publication, and so on—but no information about how the entry is to
be formatted. The formatting of the bibliography will be specified by a LATEX
\bibstyle command. For example, the command
\bibstyle{ieee}
might specify that the bibliography entries be formatted in the style used by the
IEEE in its publications. The \bibstyle command can go anywhere in your
input file.
That’s the way things will work eventually; for now, you’ll have to create your
own bibliography using the thebibliography environment. This environment
is very much like the description environment described in Section 2.2.2 on
page 37. Its argument is a copy of the longest reference name or number—e.g.,
99. or [Knuth82]. Each bibliography entry is begun with a \bibitem com-
mand instead of an \item command. The \bibitem command has a mandatory
argument containing the label by which the reference is cited. For example, I
created the bibliography entry [?] on page ?? by typing
\bibitem{knuth-tex82} Knuth, Donald ...
and referred to that entry by typing
\cite{knuth-tex82}
Note how this caused the bibliography entry to receive a number. If I wanted
it to be labeled as something like “[Knuth83]”, I would have added an optional
argument to the \bibitem command as follows:
\bibitem[{[Knuth83]}]{knuth-tex82} Knuth, Donald ...
Recall that, as discussed in Section 1.4.1, you have to put braces around an
optional argument that contains a right square bracket.
The \bibitem command defines the reference number produced by a \cite
command in exactly the same way that a \label command defines the number
produced by a \ref command, which was explained in Section 5.3 above. See
also Section 5.5 below for a more complete explanation.
5.5 Auxiliary Files

LATEX can produce quite a few files when processing your input. You can
keep it from producing many of them by putting a \nofiles declaration before
the \begin{document} command. The ones that are of primary interest to us
here are the .aux files, which are used to implement LATEX’s \includeonly
command and most of its cross-referencing features. Before describing how this
is done, I will list all of the files that LATEX can produce if your main file is
myfile.tex and you have an \include’d file named part.tex, and under what
circumstances it is produced.
myfile.dvi: The output file. It is always produced.

myfile.lst: The file containing everything that TEX printed on your terminal
and then some. It is always produced.
myfile.idx: A list of all index entries produced by \index commands. This
file is produced only if there is a \makeindex command and no \nofiles
command.
myfile.glo: A list of all glossary entries produced by \glossary commands.
This file is produced only if there is a \makeglossary command and no
\nofiles command.
myfile.toc: Generates the table of contents. This file is produced only if there
is a \tableofcontents command and no \nofiles command.
myfile.lof: Generates the list of figures. This file is produced only if there is
a \listoffigures command and no \nofiles command.
myfile.lot: Generates the list of tables. This file is produced only if there is
a \listoftables command and no \nofiles command.
myfile.aux: Described below. It is produced unless there is a \nofiles com-

mand.
part.aux: Described below. It is produced only if part.tex is processed and
there is no \nofiles command.
In addition to these, nonstandard document styles could produce other files,

such as one for a list of programs. Since a list of programs would be handled
the same as a list of figures, I will ignore this possibility.
We now come to the gory details of what gets put on the .aux files, and
how this data is used. You don’t really need to know any of this, and I suggest
that you leave everything in LATEX’s hands and not read any further. If you
run LATEX twice on the entire input, the output from the second run will have
all the right numbering—assuming you didn’t forget any \label commands or
bibliography entries. However, if you want to understand why LATEX sometimes
messes up the numbering when you’re making changes and processing only part
of the input, then read on.
A data item is written on an .aux file whenever any of the following are
encountered in the text.
• An entry for the table of contents, list of figures or list of tables. This data
item contains the complete entry and whether it is a table of contents entry
or one of the other two kinds of entry.
• A \label command. The data item contains the argument of the \label
command.
• A \bibitem command. The data item contains the command’s mandatory
argument.
• A \cite, \bibliography, or \bibstyle command. This data item is used
only by the BIBTEX program.
Any of these items may be found on either the main file’s .aux file (the file
myfile.aux) or on an \include’d file’s .aux file (the file part.aux), depending
upon whether the command that generated that item was encountered in the
main file or in the \include’d file. Note that as far as the auxiliary files are
concerned, text inserted with an \input command logically belongs to the file
containing that command.
Whenever LATEX encounters an \include command, it writes the name of
the \include’d file on the main .aux file. If LATEX processes this file, upon
reaching the end of the file, it writes the current values of all counters on the
\include’d file’s .aux file.
This describes when everything is written on the auxiliary files, and will
explain why funny things happen if you stop a LATEX execution in the middle.
If you stop LATEX by responding to a ? with an X or a I\stop, as described
in Section 1.7, then the new .aux files will be written for the main file and for
every \include’d file whose processing was begun. (The .lst file will tell you
if TEX has begun processing an \include’d file.) If you stop LATEX by using
an operating system command, the best thing to do is to use your system’s
directory commands to see when the .aux files were written.
Having written the .aux files, when does LATEX read them? LATEX reads the
previously-written version of the main .aux file when it executes the
\begin{document} command. It then tries to read the .aux file of every
\include’d file mentioned on the main file’s .aux file. It types a warning
message whenever it fails to find an .aux file. The information it reads at
this time is used to determine what each \ref, \pageref and \cite command
will produce. Even though a \ref{gnu} command comes after the \label{gnu}
command, LATEX will still use the information from the .aux file, which could be
obsolete, in generating the output for the \ref{gnu}. It is while processing the
\begin{document} command that LATEX warns you if two \label commands
or two \bibitem commands had the same argument. (A \label command and
a \bibitem command may have the same argument.)
LATEX reads the newly-written main .aux file and the latest version of every
\include’d file’s .aux file when it executes the \end{document} command. It
does two things at this time:
• It writes the .toc, .lof, and .lot files (if they should be written).
• It checks if the values assigned to any cross-referencing label have changed,
and types a warning if it has.
You now know more than you wanted to about how LATEX handles auxiliary
files. This information is of hardly any use, and will only serve to reassure you
that LATEX is doing what it’s supposed to when the cross-referencing commands
surprise you.
5.6 Interaction
When creating a large document, it’s easy to forget about things, so you may
want to leave notes for yourself. The use of the % for comments was described
in Section 1.3. However, this kind of passive comment is easy to overlook.
Therefore, LATEX provides the \typeout command for printing messages on
your terminal when LATEX processes your file. Executing the command
\typeout{Don’t forget to revise this!}
prints the message

Don’t forget to revise this!
on your screen, and puts it in the .lst file.

Sometimes it is useful to be able to change something from the keyboard
when running LATEX without changing your input file. For example, you might
want to enter an \includeonly command without putting the command in your
file. Processing the command
\typein{Enter ‘includeonly’, turkey!}

causes LATEX to type out
Enter ‘includeonly’, turkey!
\@typein=

and then wait for you to enter some text followed by a . The text that you
type will then be processed exactly as if it had appeared in the input file right
where the \typein command appeared.
The command
\typein [\turkeyed]{Enter included file names.}
is similar, except instead of processing the text you type, LATEX defines the com-
mand \turkeyed to be equivalent to that text. You might follow the \typein
command with
\includeonly{\turkeyed}
Had you responded to the \typein command by typing

gnat,gnu
then that \includeonly command would be equivalent to
\includeonly{gnat,gnu}
Warning: The argument of a \typeout or \typein command should contain

only ordinary printing characters and space characters. Commands in the ar-
gument will produce strange results.
Chapter 6
Errors
You should look at this chapter when you get an error or warning message that
you can’t cope with. The first time the instructions given in Section 1.7 for
dealing with errors prove inadequate, you should read the following section.
The other sections of this chapter should be used for finding out about what
specific error messages or warnings mean.
6.1 About Errors

In Section 1.7, you learned first aid for dealing with errors. That material will
get you through the more common simple errors. Here, you’ll find out what to
do when things are more serious.
First of all, let’s return to the question of finding out where the error oc-
curred. Remember that TEX’s error messages include an error locator that
starts with a line number. Most of the time, the line number is something like
“l.4”, meaning that the error was found when processing the fourth line from
the beginning of the file. However, if your text editor allows you to break your
file into pages, then the line number might be something like “p.3,l.4”, which
indicates the fourth line of the third page of the file.
If your input is all on a single file, then the error locator unambiguously
identifies where TEX thinks the problem is. However, if you’re using the com-
mands of Section 5.1 to split your input into several files, then you need to know
what file the error is in. TEX uses the following device to tell you what file it’s
processing. Whenever it starts processing a file, it prints a ( followed by the
file name, and when it finishes processing a file it types a ) . For example,
suppose TEX types the following.
...\ (<LAMPORT>MYFILE.TEX.13 [1] [2] [3] (<LAMPORT>PART.TEX.4 [4]

[5]) [6]
! Undefined control sequence.
134
CHAPTER 6. ERRORS 135
l.249 \newpag
?
The first ( and file name tells us that TEX began processing the file myfile.tex.
(Don’t worry about the extra stuff attached to the file name; it will depend
upon the operating system and isn’t of much interest.) After producing the
first three pages of output, it began processing part.tex. After producing the
next two pages of output, it finished processing part.tex and resumed process-
ing myfile.tex. While it was producing output page 7, when it was processing
line 279 of the file myfile.tex, TEX found an error. (In this case, it was a
misspelled \newpage command.)
This tells you you where TEX thinks the error is, but how do you figure out
where it really is? In most cases, the error is right where TEX tells you it is.
However, if you can’t see anything wrong with the input right there, then the
problem may lie elsewhere. If the error was found by LATEX, then you can look
up the error-indication message in Section 6.2 on page 136 to find out what
went wrong. If the error was found by TEX, then Section 6.3 on page 139 might
list the error message and help you figure out what caused it.
If this doesn’t help, then you’ll have to wait until LATEX has finished so you
can return to the text editor and look at your input file. To find the cause of a
mysterious error, you should scan backwards from the point where TEX found
the error. Here is a list of common mistakes to check for.
• Improperly matching braces.

• A missing math-mode delimiter—one of the commands
\[ \]  $
• A missing \end command.

• A missing command argument.
• A [ in the text begin mistaken for an optional argument.
• Trying to do something in LR or math mode that can be done only in
paragraph mode.
• Trying to do something in paragraph or LR mode that can be done only

in math mode.
If looking at the input doesn’t help, look at the output. If you were able
to use the \stop command to stop LATEX, then you will have output right up
to the point where it stopped. By examining the last part of the output very
carefully, you can often figure out exactly where things started going wrong,
which may provide the necessary clue.
When all else fails, you can isolate the error by dividing your input into
small pieces and running them through LATEX separately. In this way, you can
very quickly isolate the error to a very small section of text, which should be
enough to enable you to see what the problem is. If, after discovering the LATEX
command that caused the error, you still don’t see anything wrong there, go
back and read the section of this manual that describes that command. Then,
if you still don’t see what’s wrong, consult a local expert.
6.2 LATEX’s Error Messages

Here is a complete alphabetical list of LATEX’s error indicators, together with
their causes.
! Bad \line or \vector argument.
The first argument, which specifies the slope, of a \line or \vector command
is illegal. Look up the constraints on this argument in Section 3.4.3 on page 100.
! Bad math environment delimiter.
You either have a \] or \) command without a corresponding \[ or \( , or
else you’ve used a \[ or \( in math mode. The problem is probably that your
math mode delimiters don’t match, but it could also be caused by unbalanced
braces.
! Bad use of \\.
You issued a \\ command between paragraphs in paragraph mode, where the
command makes no sense.
! \begin{...} ended by \end{...}.
LATEX has found an \end command that doesn’t match the corresponding
\begin command. You probably misspelled the environment name in the \end
command, have an extra \begin, or else forgot an \end,
! Command name ... already used
You are trying to use a \newlist, \newtheorem, \newcommand or \newlength
command to define a command name that is already defined. You’ll have to
choose a new command name, or else, in the case of \newcommand, switch to a
\renewcommand.
! Counter too large.
LATEX is trying to number something greater than 26 with a letter. You’re
either making a very long list, or else you’ve been messing around with counter
values.
! Environment ... undefined.
You have issued a \begin command for a nonexistent environment. You prob-
ably misspelled the environment name.
! Float(s) lost.
You put a figure or table environment or a \marginpar command inside a

box—for example, by placing it a footnote. Remember that such migrating text
can be used only in outer paragraph mode. LATEX probably discovered this
long after it passed the offending environment or command, so you may have to
check quite a ways back through your input to find where you made the error.
LATEX has lost one figure, table or marginal note. However, the one it lost is
not necessarily the one that was put in the wrong place.
!Illegal character in preamble.
You have an illegal character in the argument of an array or tabular environ-
ment, or in the second argument of a \multicolumn command.
! Missing \begin{document}.
LATEX tried to produce output before encountering a \begin{document} com-
mand. If you didn’t forget the \begin{document}, then there’s something
wrong in your input file before that command. The problem may be a stray
character or an error in some declaration—for example, omitting the braces
around an argument or forgetting the \ in a command name.
! Missing p-arg in preamble.
You have a p not followed by an expression in braces in the argument of an
array or tabular environment, or in the second argument of a \multicolumn
command.
! Missing @-exp in preamble.
You have an @ character not followed by an @-expression in the argument of an
array or tabular environment, or in the second argument of a \multicolumn
command.
! \newnumbering of ... illegal
You’re using a \newnumbering command to try to change the numbering of
something that you can’t. You’re probably trying
\newnumbering{enumerate}{...}
which isn’t allowed. Reread Section 3.1.3 on page 76.
! No such counter.
You have specified a nonexistent counter in a \setcounter, \addtocounter or
\newnumbering command. This was probably a typing error.
! Not in outer par mode.
You had a figure or table environment or a \marginpar command in math
mode or inside a box. Remember that a command to produce migrating text
can be used only in outer paragraph mode.
! \pushtabs and \poptabs don’t match.
LATEX found a \poptabs with no matching \pushtabs, or has come to the
\end{tabbing} command with one or more unmatched \pushtabs commands.
! Tab overflow.
A \= command has exceeded the maximum number of tab stops that LATEX
permits. If you really need them, you might be able to convince a local expert
to modify LATEX so it allows more tab stops.
! There’s no line here to end
You are using a \newline or \\ command in paragraph mode between para-
graphs, where the command makes no sense.
! This is a LaTeX bug.
This shouldn’t happen. If it does, then there’s an error in LATEX itself and you
should call an expert for help. Save the input that generated the error, so we
can find out exactly where LATEX went wrong.
! Too deeply nested.
You have more than six list environments or more than four enumerate envi-
ronments nested within one another. Environments such as quote and verse
count as list environments.
! Too many unprocessed floats.
LATEX has run out of room to store figures, tables and marginal notes. This
probably means that you have put a huge number of figure or table envi-
ronments or \marginpar commands on a single page. It may also be caused
by giving optional placement arguments to figure or table environments, or
setting the float-placement parameters, in such a way that the figures and tables
can’t be put anywhere. Try moving some of your figure and table environ-
ments further back in your input.
! Two-column float on one-column page.
You have given a figure* or table* environment when LATEX is not producing
two-column output.
! Typeface not available.
You are trying to use a typeface that is not available in your system’s version
of LATEX—probably some exotic type style in an unusual size. You might be
able to persuade the local wizards to create a new version of LATEX with that
typeface, but you can probably live without it.
! Undefined tab position.
You are using a \> , \+ , \- , or \< command to try to step to a nonexistent
tab position.
! \< in mid line.
You are using a \< command in the middle of a line in a tabular environment.
The \< command may appear only at the beginning of a line.
6.3 TEX’s Error Messages

Here is an alphabetical list of some of TEX’s error messages and what may have
caused them.
! Double subscript.
There are two subscripts in a row in a mathematical formula—i.e., you typed
something like x_{2}_{3} , which makes no sense. If you meant x23 , then you
should have typed x_{2_{3}} .
! Double superscript.
There are two superscripts in a row in a mathematical formula—i.e., you typed
3
something like x^{2}^{3} , which makes no sense. If you meant x2 , then you
should have typed x^{2^{3}} .
! Extra alignment tab has been changed to \cr.
You are trying to put too many column entries into a single row in an array or
tabular environment. In other words, there were too many &’s before the end
of the row.
! Extra }, or forgotten $.
Your braces or $’s don’t match properly. You’ve probably forgotten a { or $
somewhere.
! I can’t find file ‘...’.
TEX couldn’t find the input file that you asked for. You can get this as a result of
typing in the wrong file name when you start LATEX, or specifying a nonexistent
input file with an \input or \include command. When this error occurs, TEX
will type
Please type another input file name:
and wait for you to type the correct file name.
! Illegal unit of measure (pt inserted).
If you just got an
! Illegal number, treated as zero.
message, then this is part of the same problem. If not, it means that LATEX
was expecting a length as an argument and it got a number instead. The most
common cause of this error is writing 0 for a length of zero instead of writing

0in . In this case, you can type and your output should be all right. However,
the error can also be caused by omitting a mandatory argument.
! Illegal parameter number in definition of ... .
This is probably caused by a \newcommand or \renewcommand command in which
you used an argument number that’s bigger than the number of arguments—for
example, you might have put a #3 in the second mandatory argument after
specifying that the command you’re definiting should have only two arguments.
If the “...” in the error indicator is \@gtempa, then you’ve probably put a #
in the argument of a \label command.
! Misplaced alignment tab character &.
You’ve used the special character & in ordinary text. You probably meant to
type \& .
! Missing control sequence inserted.
You have probably typed a \newcommand, \renewcommand or \newlength com-
mand whose first argument is not a command name.
! Missing number, treated as zero.
TEX was probably in the middle of executing a LATEX command that expected
either a number or length as an argument and didn’t get one. Perhaps you
omitted a mandatory argument, or a square bracket in your text was mistaken
for the beginning of an optional argument.
! Missing { inserted.
! Missing } inserted.
TEX has gotten confused somewhere along the line. These error messages often
occur after the point where the incorrect input is.
! Missing $ inserted.
TEX probably a command that can be used only in math mode when it wasn’t in
math mode. The commands of Section 2.3 are designed for making mathemat-
ical formulas and must be used in one of the math environments. Remember
that TEX is not in math mode when it begins processing the argument of a
box-making command, even if that command is in a math environment. This
error also occurs if TEX encounters a blank line when it’s in math mode.
! Not a letter.
You may have put something in the argument of a \hyphenation command
that doesn’t belong there.
! Paragraph ended before ... was complete.
You have a blank line in a command argument where it doesn’t belong. You
probably forgot the right brace at the end of an argument.
! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [...].
TEX has just run out of space and aborted its execution. Before you panic,
remember that the least likely cause of this error is that TEX doesn’t have the
capacity to process your document. You probably made some error that caused
TEX to keep chasing its tail until it ran out of room. The end of the error
indicator tells you what kind of space TEX ran out of. The following are the
cases in which you there’s a reasonable chance that you actually exceeded TEX’s
capacity.
box memory size: You may be creating so complicated a page of output that
TEX can’t hold all the information needed to generate it. Such complicated
output can be produced by large tabbing, tabular, array and picture

environments. TEX’s space may also be filled up with figures and tables
waiting for a place to go. To find out if you’ve really exceeded TEX’s
capacity, put a \clearpage command in your file right before the place
where TEX ran out of room and try running it again. If it doesn’t run
out of room with the \clearpage command there, then you did exceed
its capacity. If it still runs out of room, then there’s probably an error in
your file.
What can you do if you have run TEX out of room? TEX always processes a
complete paragraph before deciding where to start a new page. Inserting a
\newpage command may save the day by letting TEX write out the current
page without having to process the part of the paragraph that goes on the
next page. If the problem is caused by accumulating figures and tables,
you can try to prevent them from accumulating—either by moving them
further back in the document or by trying to get them to come out sooner.
See Section 2.4.2 on page 62 to find out how to do this.
exception dictionary: You have used \hyphenation commands to give TEX
more hyphenation information than it has room for.
hash size: You ran TEX out of room by defining too many command names
and/or using too many cross-referencing labels.
pool size: You probably ran TEX out of room by using too many cross-ref-
erencing labels and/or defining too many new command names. More
precisely, the labels and command names that you defined have too many
characters, so you can try using shorter ones. However, before assuming
that this is the case, make sure you didn’t forget a right brace on the
argument of a counter command like \setcounter, or in a \newtheorem
or \newlist command.
! Text line contains an invalid character.

Your input contains one of those weird characters that I warned you about in
Section 1.1.
! Undefined control sequence.

You probably spelled a command name incorrectly. In this case, if you type H
, TEX will tell you how to type in the correct command, but you’ll still have to
change your input file later. TEX may also produce this message in the middle
of executing a LATEX command. This probably means that there’s a LATEX
command in the wrong place—for example, an \item command that’s not inside
a list environment. Another possibility is that you left out the \pagelayout or
\documentstyle command.
! Use of ... doesn’t match its definition.
If the “...” is a LATEX command, then it’s probably one of the commands for
drawing pictures described in Section 3.4.3, and you probably used the wrong
syntax for specifying an argument. If it’s \@array that doesn’t match its
definition, then you have put something you shouldn’t have in an @-expression
in the argument of an array or tabular environment. Otherwise, I don’t know
what you might have done wrong; you’ll have to figure it out yourself.
! You can’t use ‘macro parameter character #’ in ... mode.
You’ve used the special character # in ordinary text. You probably meant to
type \# .
6.4 LATEX Warnings

LATEX’s warning messages all begin with
LaTeX Warning:
Below is an alphabetical list of all such warning messages and what they mean.
Citation ‘...’ on page ... undefined.
The symbolic citation name in a \cite command was not defined by a \bibitem
command.
Label ‘...’ multiply defined.
Two \label or \bibitem commands had the same argument the last time LATEX
processed your input.
Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to get cross-references right.
The numbers printed by \ref, \pageref or \cite commands may be wrong.
Marginpar on page ... moved.
A marginal note had to be moved down on the page to avoid printing on top
of a previous marginal note. It will therefore not line up with the place in the
text where the \marginpar command appeared.
Oval too small.
An \oval command specified an oval so small that LATEX can’t draw small
enough quarter-circles to put in its corners, so it had to draw a funny-looking
oval.
Reference ‘...’ on page ... undefined.
The argument of a \ref or \pageref command was not defined by a \label
command. If you don’t understand why it wasn’t, see Section 5.5 on page 130.
6.5 TEX Warnings

You can tell a TEX warning message because it’s not an error message, so TEX
doesn’t stop running, and it doesn’t begin with “LaTeX Warning:”. Below is
an alphabetical list of some of TEX’s warnings.
Overfull \hbox ...

See Section 3.3.2 on page 87.
Overfull \vbox ...
Because it couldn’t find a good place for a page break, TEX put more on the page
than it should. See Section 3.3.3 on page 90 for how to deal with page-breaking
problems.
Underfull \hbox
Check your output for extra vertical space. If you find some, it was probably
caused by a problem with a \\ or \newline command—for example, having
two \\ commands in succession. This warning can also be caused by inserting
a \linebreak command.
Underfull \vbox
See Section 3.3.3 on page 90.
Appendix A
Document Styles
A description of the various document styles will appear here. In addition to

various options for the article and report styles, there will also be other
document styles like letter. Suggestions for document styles are welcome.
144
Appendix B
The Bibliography Database
A description of how to make a bibliographic database file—a .bib file—will go

here.
145
Appendix C
Making Slides
There will be a special version of LATEX, called SLITEX, that can be used to
make make slides for overhead projectors. SLITEX produces pages of output,
just the way LATEX does. However, these pages are formatted so they can be
copied onto transparencies to make slides. SLITEX provides a simple mechanism
for making color slides, which are produced by generating a separate page for
each color on the slide, copying each page onto a transparency of the appropriate
color, and then overlaying the colored transparencies.
146
Index
’, 5, 8 0, 6
’,in math mode, 43 1, 6
*, 12, 27
**, 22 accents, 32
*-expression, in array or tabular argu- appendix, 69
ment, 96 arguments, 10, 72
*-form, 12 armadillo, 39, 41
*-form of float environments, 64 array environment, 15, 49, 52, 78, 86,
.aux file, 23, 127 91, 96, 137, 139, 141, 142
.aux files, 130 array environment, parameters, 118
.dvi file, 26, 130 arrays, 49
.glo file, 130 arrows, in a picture, 104
.idx file, 126, 130 article document style, 7, 10, 30, 66
.idx file, producing, 126 article document style, appendix, 69
.lof file, 68, 130, 132 article document style, equation num-
.lot file, 68, 130, 132 bering in, 42
.lst file, 26, 130, 132 article document style, float-placement
.lst file, putting things in, 133 in, 62
.plo file, 112 article documentstyle, figure number-
.sty file, 112 ing in, 61
.toc file, 67, 130, 132 aux files, 129
[, 5 auxiliary file, 127
&, 49
“$, 43 b, 51, 101
], 5 b float-placement position, 62
‘, 5, 8 backslash, 5
“Log-like” functions, 48 badness, 90
Paragraph-Making Parameters, 117 bibliography, 128
11-point type, 30 bibliography database file, 129
11pt, 112 bibtex, 131
11pt substyle, 30 blank line, 32
12-point type, 31 blank lines, 94
12pt, 112 blank lines, before and after environ-
12pt substyle, 31 ments, 33
blank page, 91
147
INDEX 148
blobs, rectangular, 84 counters, printing their values, 77

boldface, 6, 16, 29 cross references, 127
bottom of line, 74, 85 cross-referencing, 23, 122
bottomnumber, 116 cross-referencing labels, using too many,
box, 20 141
box, centered on its own line, 80
box, moving text around in, 79 dashes, 8
boxes, 80 database file, 129
boxes, making with frames, 82 dbltopnumber, 116
braces, 5, 14, 30 declaration, global, 37
braces,matching, 6 declarations, 16
brackets, 5 declarations as environments, 18
defining length commands, 75
c, 49 delimiter, unmatched, 54
calligraphic symbols, 44 delimiters, 53
caret, 6 depth, changing apparent, 85
carriage return, 5 description environment, 38, 39, 79
carriage return, in tabbing environment, descriptions, 39
94 display math style, 55
case, 127 displaymath environment, 42, 55
center environment, 40, 86 document environment, 16
centered, 95 document style, 2, 7, 65, 109, 112, 113
centering, 40 document style parameters, for two-column
centering a box, 80 format, 121
centering, array column, 49 document style, 11-point, 30
circles, 105 document styles, new, 2
citations, 128 document substyle, 30, 31
cm, 73 dots, 55
column, 92 dots, filling space with, 80
columns, evening in two-column for- double-column, see two-column, 120
mat, 120 dvi file, 90
comma, 30
command classes, 15 el, 6
command-names, 10 ellipsis, 55
commands, 10 em, 73
commands, entering from keyboard, 133 emacs, 6
commands, latex versus tex, 23 empty page style, 113
commands,defining, 27 enumerate counter, 38, 77, 78
comments, 9, 132 enumerate environment, 37, 38, 77
contents files, 68 enumerate environment, changing left
control-l, 5 margin, 109
coordinate, 100 enumerate environments, nested too deeply,
counter command, 141 138
counters, 37, 76, 124 environment, 15
INDEX 149
environment arguments, 15 glyphs, 86

Environments, 15 gnat, 39
environments, paragraph-making, 33 gnu, 39, 41
equation environment, 42, 55 Greek letters, 44
equation numbering, 42 Greek letters,variant, 44
error indication line, 23
error locator, 23, 134 h float-placement position, 62
errors, 22, 134 headings page style, 113
ex, 73 height, changing apparent, 85
horizontal braces, 52
figure environment, 16, 60, 137, 138 horizontal line in math mode, 52
figure placement, 62 horizontal lines, in tabular or array en-
figure* environment, 16, 64, 138 vironment, 97
figures, 15, 16, 59, 91 horizontal space,adding, 78
figures, labeling, 127 hyphenation, 19, 88
file names, 4 hyphens, 88
float page, 62
i, dotless, 32
float pages, 91
i,dotless, 53
float parameters, 115
IEEE, 129
float placement, 62
indentation,paragraph, 8
float placement specifier, 62
index, 126
float-placement constraints, 63, 115
index entry, 126
float-placement parameters, 138
index file, 126
floats, 59
index subentry, 126
flushing, 40
index subsubentry, 126
flushing, in a tabbing environment, 94
index, using, 21
flushleft environment, 40, 86
indirect commands, 18
flushleft, array column, 49
initial declaration, 114
flushright environment, 40, 86
inner paragraph mode, 20
flushright, array column, 49
input file, 4
font, 29
input, entering from keyboard, 133
footnote counter, 59, 78, 84
interaction, 132
footnotes, 15, 20, 57
interline spacing, 34
footnotes, in minipage, 84
invisible text, 34
footnotes, parameter, 115
italic, 17, 29
foreign symbols, 33
italic, upper-case Greek, 44
formulas, 42
item label, 37
fractions, 55
itemize environment, 15, 38
galley, 59 itemize environment, changing left mar-
glo, 127 gin, 109
global declarations, 18 itemized lists, with your choice of tick
glossary, 126 marks, 39
glyph, 19 j, dotless, 32
INDEX 150
j,dotless, 53 marginal note, moved, 142

marginal notes, 15, 64
keyboard, 44 marginal notes, in two-column format,
knuth, 2, 3 120
Knuth, Donald E., 1 marginal notes, parameters, 115
math environment, 42, 55
l, 6, 49, 101 math environments, short forms, 42
l, math italic, 56, 80
shortstack argument, 105 math mode, 19, 42, 44, 50
l, argument of math mode, type-size changing, 32
makebox, 81 math mode, type-style changing, 30
labeled lists, 39 math style, 55
lablst.tex, 128 mathematical formulas, 42
left quote, 5 medium space in math mode, 48
left-to-right mode, 19 messages, generating, 132
lemmas, 35 minipage, 34
length, 73 minipage environment, 58, 83, 84
length command, 74 minipage environment, footnotes in, 57
letter document style, 144 minipage environment, nesting, 84
library of declarations, 123 minus sign, 8
line breaking, 8, 9, 26, 87 mm, 73
line breaking, preventing, 9, 89 modes, 19
line breaking, with , 86 mpfootnote counter, 76, 78, 84
lines, horizontal, 85 myfile, 22
lines, thickness in a picture, 106 myfile.tex, 4, 21, 123, 126, 127
lines, vertical, 85 myheadings page style, 113
list counter, 77, 108
list environment, 34, 37, 77, 92, 108 negative space,adding, 78
list environments, nested too deeply, negative thin space in math mode, 48
138 nesting, 16
list of figures, 61, 67 nesting environments, 16
list of figures, .aux file entry for, 131 nesting of paragraph-making environ-
list of tables, 61, 67 ments, 34
list of tables, .aux file entry for, 131 nesting, of paragraph environments, 40
lists, 37, 108 new-page character, 5
logical structure, 1 nonprinting characters, 4
lower-case, 127 normal page layout, 7, 112
lowering text, 85 null delimiter, 54
LR box, 95
LR mode, 19, 39, 42, 75, 80, 85, 95 O, 6
oh, 6
macro expansion, 73 one, 6
main file, 123 one-column text, 120
making boxes of a specified width, 81 one-sided printing, 65
INDEX 151
operating system, 22 pictures, 100

optional arguments, 12 plain page style, 113
ordering of floats, 64 point, 73
ordinary printing character, 29 points, 30
ordinary printing characters, 6, 9 position, 100
ordinary printing characters,in math mode,
printing characters, 4
43 programs, 60
origin, 100 pronunciation, 1
outer paragraph mode, 20, 57, 58, 137 pt, 73
ovals, 106
overfull question mark, 23
hbox, 26, 87 quotation environment, 34
overlining, 52 quotations, 34
quote characters, 5
p float-placement position, 62 quote environment, 34, 110, 138
p-expression, 97 quotes, 8
page breaking, 26, 90, 143
page breaking, preventing, 34 r, 49, 101
page counter, 77 r,
page layout, 7, 111 shortstack argument, 105
Page Layout Parameters, 114 raising text, 85
page numbering, 18, 77, 114 rectangular blobs, 84
page style, 112 reference points, 101
page-breaking commands, in two-column reid,brian, 1, 3
format, 120 report document style, 7, 10, 91
pages, in input file, 134 report document style, appendix, 69
paragraph, 8 report document style, equation num-
paragraph indentation, suppressing, 8 bering in, 42
paragraph mode, 19, 34, 42, 80, 83, 86 report document style, figure-placement
paragraph-making environments, in a in, 62
minipage, 84 report document style, float-placement
parbox, 20, 57, 60, 64, 96 in, 62
parbox in tabular environment, 97 report documentstyle, figure number-
parbox, paragraph-making environments ing in, 61
in, 34 right quote, 5
parboxes, 41 rigid length, 74
parentheses, 5 roman, 16, 29
parsep, 108 Roman type style, 56
parts, 122 roots, 55
percent, 9, 110, 132 rubber lengths, 74, 116
period, 30 rule boxes, 84
period, space after, 8
picture environment, 57, 92, 100, 141 sans serif, 30
picture environment, reusing, 82 scope, 17
INDEX 152
scribe, 1, 129 superscripts, double, 139

script math style, 55 symbolic labeling of equations, 42
scriptscript math style, 55 symbolic names, making list of, 128
sectioning command, 78 symbols,math, 44
sectioning commands, 10, 66 symbols,nonmath, 33
simple text, 8
single-column, see one-column, 120 t, 51, 101
size,type, 29 t float-placement position, 62
slanted, 30 tab, 5, 93
slitex, 146 tab stop, 92
small caps, 30 tab, in verbatim, 111
space, 8, 48, 49 tabbing commands, 95
space character, 4, 8 tabbing environment, 86, 91, 92, 141
space, after command, 72 tabbing environment, parameters, 118
space, around a float environment, 61 table, 91
space, around an indirect command, 18 table environment, 60, 137, 138
space, between array columns, 50 table of contents, 18, 61, 67
space, in math mode, 48 table of contents parameters, 117
space, in verbatim, 110 table of contents, .aux file entry for,
space-producing commands, 15 131
spaces, 11 table of contents, using, 21
spaces, in math mode, 43 table* environment, 64, 138
spaces, in tabbing environment, 94 tables, 15, 59, 91
spacing, 78 tables, labeling, 127
spacing, figures and tables, 116 tabular environment, 78, 86, 91, 96,
special character commands, 14 105, 137, 139, 141, 142
special characters, 9, 92 tabular environment, parameters, 118
special printing characters, 5 terminal, 6
special symbols, 33, 51 tex, 1, 118
square brackets, 12 TEX macros, 73
square root, 55 texbook, 2, 23
stairs, 16 text editing, 16, 44
stopping latex, 26 text math style, 50, 55
stopping latex, effect on .aux files, 131 text-producing commands, 15, 19
storage bins, 82 textfraction, 116
stretchable lengths, 79 textheight, 111
string space, 128 the paragraph indentation, in two-column
strut, 85 format, 121
style parameters, 114 thebibliography environment, 129
style, math, 55 theindex environment, 120, 126
style, type, 29 theorems, 21, 35
subscripts, 44, 55 thick space in math mode, 48
subscripts, double, 139 thin space in math mode, 48
superscripts, 44, 55 tilde, 6, 9, 127
INDEX 153
title page, 69 wide accents, 53

titlepage environment, 69 WYSIWYG systems, 3
topnumber, 115
totalnumber, 116 zero, 6
two-column floats, 64 zero length, 73
two-column output, 16 zero-width boxes, 82
two-column text, 120
two-sided printing, 65, 91
twocolumn document style option, 120
twoside, 112
type size, 29, 30
type style, 29
type styles, 32
typeface, 29
typeface, unavailable, 138
typefaces, in math mode, 56
typesetting mathematics, 2
typewriter, 32, 33
typewriter typeface, 30
Underfull
hbox message, 89
underlining, 52
underscore, 6
upper-case, 127
variable-sized math symbols, 47

variant commands, 12
variant Greek letters, 44
verbatim, 110
verbatim environment, 92, 110
verbatim* environment, 111
verse, 35, 138
verse environment, 35, 86, 110
vertical line, between columns, 121
vertical lines, in tabular or array envi-
ronment, 96
vertical positioning of arrays, 51
vertical spacing, 79
warning message, 25
warning, marginpar moved, 64
weird characters, 5
what you see is what you get, 3

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Based on Obsolete 13 December 1983 Version of

Created 7 July 1984

2.3.7 Mathematical Miscellany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

4 Two-Column Text 120

5 Getting Bigger 122

5.5 Auxiliary Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

A Document Styles 144

B The Bibliography Database 145

C Making Slides 146

1.1 The file myfile.tex. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

2.1 A Sample Figure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

3.1 A grand example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

LATEX is a computer program for generating many kinds of printed documents.

... will appear.\footnote {And I produced this footnote by ... }

1.1 Preparing an Input File

. : ; , ? ! " ‘ ’ ( ) [ ] < > - = + / * | @

case I accidentally deleted a single brace. Adding these commands to my editor

1.2 Starting and Ending

1.3 Typing Simple Text

Euclid et al. proved I + I = II. Meanwhile . . .

1.4.1 Command Names and Arguments

Another useful command is \today, which causes LATEX to produce today’s

\parbox {2in}{A Parbox}

If a command with no mandatory arguments has a *-form, then we have

1.4.2 The Taxonomy of Commands

\begin{array}{llr} ... \end{array}

Page-Breaking and Line-Breaking Commands

1.6 Getting Fancier

1.7 Running LATEX

Is there a little town in Wales called

Figure 1.1: The file myfile.tex.

This is a warning message rather than an error message. There’s no question-

\hbox(6.94444+1.94444)x340.0, glue set - 1.0

1.8 Some Words of Advice

This chapter describes the basic text-producing commands, environments and

2.1 Changing the Typeface

2.1.1 Specifying the Type Style

\rm: Roman. This is an example of the Roman typeface; it is the typeface

\sl: Slanted. This is an example of the slanted typeface.

\tt: Typewriter. This is an example of the typewriter typeface.

2.1.2 Specifying the Type Size

you can make it a separate \documentstyle command, writing

Additional Type Sizes

\normalsize: This is an example of the normal type size.

\large: This is an example of the large type size.

\Large: This is an example of the Large type size.

\LARGE: This is an example of the LARGE type size.

\huge: This is a huge type size.

Each of these size-changing declarations switches to the Roman type style.

Because the information needed to generate each typeface takes up valuable

Warning: If you want to typeset one or more entire paragraphs in a different

2.1.3 Accents and Special Symbols

Type to get Type to get Type to get

Table 2.1: Accents.

Type to get Type to get Type to get

Table 2.2: Foreign Symbols

2.2 Paragraph-Making Environments

2.2.1 Simple Paragraph-Making Environments

Leaving a blank line produces ...

There is an environment named verse

For instead of making\\

Theorems, Lemmas, Etc.

Theorem 1 All theorem numbers are interesting.