A Brief Introduction to the LaTeX Typesetting Environment/Writing a Document from a Template

=Chapter 3: Writing a Document from a Template=

Articles
If you're a scientist or scientist-in-training you've probably had to deal with writing an article at some point in your life. Wikipedia has this to say about the scientific article:

"Articles are usually between five and twenty pages and are complete descriptions of current original research findings, but there are considerable variations between scientific fields and journals – 80-page articles are not rare in mathematics or theoretical computer science (from Wikipedia, Scientific journal"

Which is extremely true. Again, for the sake of brevity we will not delve into the specific requirements of the various academic and scientific journals one can publish too (however the author will note that excellent examples can be found at Arixiv or by using a Google Scholar search for a topic or paper of interest), we will instead simply look at how one would format one of these documents.

The Absolute Basic Template
We present here the simplest template to work with. From here you can edit the body of the document, create your article, and essentially get a finished product that looks good. Of course every individual author will have different needs but those can be addressed later. Here is the template, we'll go through everything else in a moment, it may be a good idea to copy this into your typesetting application so you can see what it look like, but don't typeset it quite yet:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,oneside]{article} \usepackage{geometry} \geometry{letterpaper} \usepackage[parfill]{parskip} \usepackage{epsfig} \usepackage{float} \usepackage{subfig} \usepackage{fancyhdr} \usepackage{wrapfig} \pagestyle{fancy} \usepackage[]{hyperref} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{amsmath} \setcounter{tocdepth}{1} %Document begins here \begin{document} \title{An Example} \author{An Author} \date{1/1/12} % delete this line to display the current date \maketitle \abstract{This is an abstract} \tableofcontents \section{Section 1} This is a section \subsection{Subsection 1} This is a subsection \end{document}

The first thing you'll want to note is that any line beginning with a '%' symbol