WRITING AND PUBLISHING SCIENTIFIC PAPERS USING TEX AND LATEX

There is a common misbelieve that, in a scientific paper, what really matters is the content, not the layout; in reality, people do not read poorly presented papers. On the other hand, everyone agrees that the author(s) should indeed focus on the content and should not waste time on the layout. (La)TeX is based on this idea, that authors should be able to focus on the meaning of what they are writing without being distracted by the visual presentation of the information. In preparing a (La)TeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using concepts such as chapter, section, table, figure, etc., and lets the (La)TeX system worry about the presentation of these structures. It, therefore, encourages the separation of layout from content, while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed. TeX was developed in late 70’s and early 80’s by Donald E. Knuth, a professor of computer science at Stanford University. TeX is a typesetting language that was designed to produce high quality documents. LaTeX (usually pronounced [`leɪ.tɛk] in English) is a document markup language for TeX that was developed in the mid-80’s by Leslie Lamport and has become the dominant method for using TeX. The current version is LaTeX2e. TeX is distributed under a free software license, the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) and has a huge community which sustains its development. A number of TeX distributions are available, including TeX Live (multiplatform), MiKTeX (Windows), MacTeX (Mac OS X). MiKTeX (curent stable version is 2.6) is an up-to-date TeX implementation for the Windows operating system. MiKTeX offers a complete set of utilities, macro packages and fonts, e.g., LaTeX, pdfTeX, ConTeXt, just to name a few.