The TeX typesetting system was developed by Donald Knuth to assist with the production of professionally typeset documents. The system has features that make it particularly suited to creating technical documentation with substantial mathematical content. The TeX system is different to conventional word processing applications as it concentrates on converting the raw document into properly formatted text. Many of the complicated rules for line, paragraph and page formatting are handled by algorithms within the TeX system so the user is left to concentrate on the contents of his document rather than get sidetracked with visual editing.
LaTeX is an add-on to the TeX document preparation system for high-quality typesetting and provides an easier interface to the features of TeX for common components of a document. It is regularly used for writing medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it is not restricted to these types of documents and it can be used for almost any form of publishing. It is frequently used by Statisticians for reporting research results so will be discussed on this website, with particular focus on the beamer package for presentations.
As an example it is easy to typeset a mathematical formula, such as the equation for the logistic regression model:
There are plenty of other simple or more complicated mathematical equations that we can write out more easily than using word processing software.
Useful Links
- The UK TeX Archive Web pages
- LaTeX – A document preparation system
- The LaTeX Beamer Class Homepage
- TeXample.net
- PSTricks web site
Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.
