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By Root 1332 0

being on the beginning of the next). You need only use the tilde to generate a space between two words that should be stuck together on the same line, as in Chapter~9 and Mr.~Jones. (In retrospect, we could have used the tilde in the \begin{letter} and opening commands, although it's doubtful TEX would break a line anywhere within the address or the opening.)

The second thing to take note of on line 14 is the use of \em to generate emphasized text in the output. TEX supports various other fonts , including boldface (\bf) and typewriter (\tt).

Line 20 uses the closing command to close off the letter. This also has the effect of appending the signature used on line 4 after the closing in the output. Lines 22 to 23 use the commands \end{letter} and \end{document} to end the letter and document environments begun on lines 6 and 7.

You'll notice that none of the commands in the LATEX source has anything to do with setting up margins, line spacing, or other functional issues of text formatting. That's all taken care of by the LATEX macros on top of the TEX engine. LATEX provides reasonable defaults for these parameters; if you wanted to change any of these formatting options, you could use other LATEX commands (or lower-level TEX commands) to modify them.

We don't expect you to understand all the intricacies of using LATEX from such a limited example, although this should give you an idea of how a living, breathing LATEX document looks. Now, let's format the document in order to print it out.

Formatting and Printing

Believe it or not, the command used to format LATEX source files into something printable is latex. After editing and saving the previous example, letter.tex, you should be able to use the following command:

eggplant$ latex letter

This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)

(letter.tex

LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>

Babel and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, b

ahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esperanto, e

stonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian, latin, magyar, norsk, polis

h, portuges, romanian, russian, serbian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swedish, tur

kish, ukrainian, nohyphenation, loaded.

(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/letter.cls

Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX

document class

(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))

No file letter.aux.

[1] (letter.aux) )

Output written on letter.dvi (1 page, 1128 bytes).

Transcript written on letter.log.

eggplant$

latex assumes the extension .tex for source files. Here, LATEX has processed the source letter.tex and saved the results in the file letter.dvi. This is a "device-independent" file that generates printable output on a variety of printers. Various tools exist for converting .dvi files to PostScript, HP LaserJet, and other formats, as we'll see shortly.

Instead of immediately printing your letter, you may wish to preview it to be sure that everything looks right. If you're running the X Window System, you can use the xdvi command to preview .dvi files on your screen. If you are also using the KDE desktop environment, kdvi is a more user-friendly version of xdvi. What about printing the letter? First, you need to convert the .dvi to something your printer can handle. DVI drivers exist for many printer types. Almost all the program names begin with the three characters dvi, as in dvips, dvilj, and so forth. If your system doesn't have one you need, you have to get the appropriate driver from the archives if you have Internet access. See the FAQ for comp.text.tex for details.

If you're lucky enough to have a PostScript printer (or have a PostScript filter installed in your system), you can use dvips to generate PostScript from the .dvi file:

eggplant$ dvips -o letter.ps letter.dvi

You can then print the PostScript using lpr. Or, to do this in one step:

eggplant$ dvips letter.dvi | lpr

There are printer-specific DVI drivers such as dvilj for HP LaserJets as well, but most of these are considered obsolete; use dvips and,