Markup languages. LaTeX.

Introduction

In this article, we will cover the following topics:

1. What are markup languages ​​and why are they needed?
2. What is LaTeX?
3. How special is LaTeX?

What is version control?

A markup language (text) in computer terminology is a set of characters or sequences of characters inserted into text to convey information about its display or structure. It belongs to the class of computer languages. A text document written using a markup language contains not only the text itself (as a sequence of words and punctuation marks), but also additional information about its various parts - for example, an indication of headings, selections, lists, etc. In more complex cases A markup language allows you to insert interactive elements and content from other documents into a document.

2. What is LaTeX?

What is LATEX? In short, it is a TEX-based publishing system. The computer layout system TEX (pronounced “tech”) was created by the outstanding American mathematician and programmer Donald Knuth in the late 70s of the XX century; publishing systems based on it are still widely used and are not going to give up their positions. Here is a short list of TEX’s advantages:

1. None of the currently existing publishing systems can compare with TEX in the printing quality of texts with mathematical formulas.
2. The TEX system has been implemented on all modern computer platforms, and all of these implementations really work in the same way.
3. Thanks to this, TEX has become an international language for the exchange of mathematical and physical articles: having typed his article in TEX, a mathematician can send it by e-mail to his colleague, even if the sender works under Windows, and the recipient works with UNIX or, say , on a Macintosh.
4. There are vast “preprint archives” on the Internet to which anyone can submit (and from which anyone can receive) an article; all these articles are typed again in TEX.
5. Finally, the core TEX implementations for all platforms are free.

As already noted, TEX is a system created by the American mathematician and programmer Donald E. Knuth for typesetting texts with formulas. By itself, TEX is a specialized programming language (Knuth not only invented the language, but also wrote a translator for it, and in such a way that it works exactly the same on a variety of computers), which is written in publishing systems used in practice. More precisely, each TEX-based publishing system is a package of macro definitions (macropackage) of this language. Specifically, LATEX (pronounced “latex” or “latex”, also spelled “LaTeX”) is a TEX-based publishing system created by Leslie Lamport.

What’s special about LaTeX?

This tool is used ubiquitously to create scientific papers, write books, and many other forms of publication. It allows not only to create beautifully designed documents, but also allows users to implement complex typesetting elements such as mathematical expressions, tables, references and bibliographies very quickly, getting consistent markup across all sections.

Thanks to the availability of a large number of open libraries (more on that later), the possibilities of LaTeX are almost limitless. These libraries extend the user experience even further, allowing you to add footnotes, draw diagrams, and more.

One of the most compelling reasons many people use LaTeX is to separate the content of a document from its style. This means that after writing the content, you can easily change its appearance. Similarly, you can create one document style and use it to standardize the look of others.

This allows scientific journals to create templates for submissions. These templates have pre-defined markup, leaving only the content to be added. In fact, there are hundreds of such templates, ranging from various resumes to slide presentations.

Conclusions

LaTeX is a convenient and easy to use markup language. With it, you can create standardized articles and books, it simplifies the work with text files due to the ability to create automatic table of contents, bibliography and other sections that may be needed. It has a huge number of advantages, its possibilities are almost limitless thanks to a large number of open libraries.