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L^AT_EX is a document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program.

It offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and DTP, especially numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies, and much more. LaTeX was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport and has become the dominant method for using TeX; few people write in plain TeX any more. The current version is LaTeX2ε.

1 Pronunciation

LaTeX is usually pronounced "LAY-tech" (where ch represents the sound of ch in German mich or German Technik, but not Scottish loch: the last character in the name is actually a capital chi, as teX derives from Greek technê. See the International Phonetic Alphabet article for more information.) Leslie Lamport, the LaTeX creator, has said he doesn't favor or deprecate any pronunciation. It is traditionally printed with the special typographical logo shown on this page. In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced in running text, the word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX to avoid confusion with the word latex.

2 The typesetting system

LaTeX is based on the idea that authors should be able to concentrate on writing within the logical structure of their document, rather than spending their time on the details of formatting . It encourages the separation of formatting from content , whilst still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed. By keeping the formatting details in a separate file from the text, it is often regarded as superior to word processors and most other desktop publishing systems, which allow trivially easy visual layoutLayout in publishing, is the process of arranging editorial content, advertising, graphics and other information in a manner that creates an effective presentation. Keyboard layout in civil engineering it can mean a map or a drawing of a construction site changes but tend to intertwine contentContent can mean Comfort and a feeling of satisfaction Creations, as in open content or free content. In narrative art such as many novels and movies, content is often the subject of the plot or the events and characters contained within. In this and in m and form so tightly that consistency and automation are often difficult. LaTeX also provides great flexibility in formatting while maintaining the identity of structure, which purely structural systems like SGML and XMLXML eXtensible Markup Language is a W3C recommendation for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured tex do not directly address.

LaTeX can be arbitrarily extended by using the underlying macro language for developing custom formats. For example, there are numerous commercial implementation s of the whole TeX system (which includes LaTeX), and vendors may offer extra features like phone support and additional typefaces.

A number of popular commercial DTP systems use modified versions of the original TeX typesetting engine. The recent rise in popularity of XML systems and the demand for large-scale batch production of publication-quality typesetting from such sources has seen a steady increase in the use of LaTeX.