Introduction to Latex-part:3

For truly impatient ones here's a sample code to try out!

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello World!
\end{document}

The code will be explained later.

Spaces

"Whitespace characters, such as blank or tab, are treated uniformly as "space" by Latex. Several consecutive white spaces are treated as one "space". White space at the start of a line is generally ignored and a single line break is treated as "whitespace". An empty line between the two line of text defines the end of the paragraph. And several empty lines are treated as one empty line.

Special Characters

The following symbols are reserved characters that either have a special meaning under Latex or are unavailable in all the fonts. if you enter them directly in your text, they will normally not print, but rather make Latex do things you did not intend.

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|#  $  %  ^  &  _  {  }  ~  \

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The only way for you to insert these characters in your document is to prefix them with a backslash(\).

for eg:- \#  \%  \$ ...

Another funny thing is that you cannot use "\\" to print \ in your document. Because \\ is used for newline in Latex. For you to insert a backslash in your document try:

                              "\backslash"

Latex Environment

Environments in Latex have a role that is quite similar to commands, but they usually have effect on a wider part of the document. Their syntax is:

\begin{environmentname}

text to be influenced

\end{environmentname}

Between the \begin and the \end you can put other commands and nested environments.

Comments

When Latex encounters a % character while processing an input file, it ignores the rest of the current line, the line break and all white space at the beginning of the next line.