First off let me say at most users will be happy with LaTeX and not
plain TeX. Plain TeX is a complex programing language. LaTeX was
written in TeX and interned for mear mortals to understand. There are
whole books written about TeX learning it is akin to learning C++
That said let's move on the LaTeX. LaTeX is built around the idea of
environment. There are environments for things like letters, reports,
books and so on so the first thing you do is to decide what you are
going to write and then pick the right environment for that task.
TexShop has these all set up in templates ahead of time.
Lets take a look at one LaTeX function that of \footnote
\footnote[number]{text}
The \footnote command places the numbered footnote text at the bottom
of the current page. The optional argument, number, is used to change
the default footnote number.
So if we are writing along like this and we nee to enter a footnote in
our text it would look like this \footnote{This is the text of the
footnote.} and this is the rest of the text.
Now when the text was processed by TeX we would end up with a numbered
footnote at the bottom of the page and a superscript number 1 in the
text right after the word "this" The numbering is automatic so
\footnote will keep track of the footnote numbers and order them
right on the page. LaTeX also will take care of formatting details
like type size, how much space to leave at the bottom of the page and
so on.
I've only scratched the surface of what can be done there is MakeIndex
to produce indexes and so on.
Greg Kearney
