An Example Document
Leslie Lamport
January 21, 1994
This is an example input file Comparing it with
the output it generates can show you how to
produce a simple document of your own
The ends of words and sentences are marked
by spaces. It doesn't matter how many
spaces you type; one is as good as 100 The
end of a line counts as a space
One or more blank lines denote the end
of a paragraph
Since any number of consecutive spaces are treated
like a single one, the formatting of the input
file makes no difference to
,
but it makes a difference to you When you use
, making your input file as easy to read
as possible will be a great help as you write
your document and when you change it This sample
file shows how you can add comments to your own input
file
Because printing is different from typewriting,
there are a number of things that you have to do
differently when preparing an input file than if
you were just typing the document directly
Quotation marks like
this
have to be handled specially, as do quotes within
quotes:
`this'
is what I just
wrote, not `that'
Dashes come in three sizes: an
intraword
dash, a medium dash for number ranges like
12,
and a punctuation
dashlike
this
A sentenceending space should be larger than the
space between words within a sentence You
sometimes have to type special commands in
conjunction with punctuation characters to get
this right, as in the following sentence
Gnats, gnus, etc.all
begin with G
You should check the spaces after periods when
reading your output to make sure you haven't
forgotten any special cases Generating an
ellipsis
with the right spacing around the periods requires
a special command
interprets some common characters as
commands, so you must type special commands to
generate them These characters include the
following:
and
In printing, text is usually emphasized with an
italic
type style
A long segment of text can also be emphasized
in this way Text within such a segment can be
given additional emphasis
It is sometimes necessary to prevent from
breaking a line where it might otherwise do so
This may be at a space, as between the Mr. and
Jones in
Mr.Jones,
or within a wordespecially when the word is a
symbol like
itemnum
that makes little sense when hyphenated across
lines
FootnotesThis is an example of a footnote.
pose no problem
is good at typesetting mathematical formulas
like
or
or
The spaces you type in a formula are
ignored Remember that a letter like
x
is a formula when it denotes a mathematical
symbol, and it should be typed as one
Text is displayed by indenting it from the left
margin Quotations are commonly displayed There
are short quotations
This is a short a quotation It consists of a
single paragraph of text See how it is formatted
and longer ones
This is a longer quotation It consists of two
paragraphs of text, neither of which are
particularly interesting
This is the second paragraph of the quotation It
is just as dull as the first paragraph
Another frequentlydisplayed structure is a list
The following is an example of an itemized
list
- This is the first item of an itemized list
Each item in the list is marked with a tick
You don't have to worry about what kind of tick
mark is used
- This is the second item of the list It
contains another list nested inside it The inner
list is an enumerated list
- This is the first item of an enumerated
list that is nested within the itemized list
- This is the second item of the inner list
allows you to nest lists deeper than
you really should
This is the rest of the second item of the outer
list It is no more interesting than any other
part of the item
- This is the third item of the list
You can even display poetry
There is an environment
for 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
Mathematical formulas may also be displayed A
displayed formula
is
oneline long; multiline
formulas require special formatting instructions
(, ') x y2 zin
Don't start a paragraph with a displayed equation,
nor make one a paragraph by itself