A DBD sample chapter as an introduction into LaTeX
This should help people getting started in LateX with the most commonly used commands and blocks, a good references is the LaTeX Wikibooks, which can be found on
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX.
Philosophy: Why is LaTeX so different than Word ?
In the LaTeX the author is and supposed to focus on content and logical structure of the document. The page layout, fonts, colors, etc. are handled by the layout class which is provided by the LaTeX system. This means the author doesn't need to worry about these things and can just write content. Hence also the layout possibilities for The backside is, that the LaTeX file needs to be compiled first, before one can have a look at the final document.
But especially in large documents, the strict separation
Some Basics
LaTeX Commands start with a \ and have usually the following structure
\command{parameter}[options]
LaTeX is very often using begin-end blocks to structure text elements
\begin{somepart}
\end{somepart}
Structuring documents
\chapter{A sample Chapter}
\section {Introduction}
\subsection {List of systems}
\subsubsection{List of subsystems}
\paragraph{List of subsystems}
these commands can be used to structure chapters into sections, subsections, paragraphs etc.
More details can be found here
Lists and enumerations
\section{Lists and enumerations}
An example for a bullet list
\begin {itemize}
\item Item 1
\item Item 2
\end {itemize}
and for a numbered list
\begin {enumerate}
\item Item 1
\item Item 2
\end {enumerate}
A common element are bulleted and numbered lists, which is shown above.
Labels and cross-references
\section{Labels and Cross-referencing}
Any position in a text can be marked using
\label{blabla} and be referenced using \ref{blabla}
common are references and labels for chapters, sections and figures
\chapter{A sample Chapter\label{sid:chapter_sample}}
as can be seen in Chapter~\ref{{sid:chapter_sample}