Your objective is to write a paper. To do that, you need to create a file of the right sort (that contains the right commands). To be more specific, you need to create a plain text file with a .tex file extension. So the file for your first paper might be called ‘first_paper.tex’. (Those unfamiliar to the world of computers might be surprised to find out that there are a number of file extensions that a plain text file could take. I always thought they had to be .txt files, but LaTeX files are .tex files and your bibliography file will be a .bib file, both of which are plain text files; there are, in fact, quite a few different flavors of plain text files.)
I’d recommend writing your paper using either TeXShop (if you have a Mac) or TeXnicCenter (if you have a PC). Just start the program and you should get a new file (you may have to select File -> New). Whatever program you use, if it is a LaTeX-specific editor, once you save the file, it should have the right extension.
Every paper you write will need to include the same basic commands. It must open with a prologue. And it must end with an \end{document} command. Your editor will likely have some templates you can choose from that will do all this for you. Let them do the work when you are getting started (eventually, you can modify the basic template and make your own template; but that is a few steps down the road). When you open up TeXShop for example, there is a button marked ‘Templates’ at the top. If you click on that, you will get a drop-down menu of template options. Start with the LaTeX template and you will have most of the prologue written for you.
Here is what the TeXShop LaTeX template (henceforth, the LaTeX template) looks like:
\documentclass[11pt]{amsart}
\usepackage{geometry}
%\geometry{letterpaper}
%\geometry{landscape}
\usepackage[parfill]{parskip}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{epstopdf}
\DeclareGraphicsRule{.tif}{png}{.png}%
{`convert #1 `dirname #1`/`basename #1 .tif`.png}
\title{Brief Article}
\author{The Author}
\date{} % Activate to display a given date or no date
\begin{document}
This will almost work for us. The \documentclass command tells LaTeX very general formatting information about your paper. The amsart document class is for math papers. For papers that are a little more philosophy-like, you’ll want to use the Article class. And you will probably want your paper to be in 12 point font. So change out the first line to this:
documentclass[12pt]{article}
Before you begin writing the content of your paper, you want to do three things. First, change the stuff in the scope of the \title command to be the title of your paper. Second, put your name in for ‘The Author’. Third, make sure there is a \maketitle command right after the \begin{document} command. This will be there if you use a template. This command tells LaTeX to write your name and title on your paper.
Now you can begin writing your paper.
Writing the content of your paper
For the most part, writing the content of a basic paper is no different than writing a paper using a word processor. There are a few things you need to be aware of, however.
New lines
You must end a paragraph with a blank line (alternatively, you can type two backslashes). A single return will not be read as the start of a new paragraph. You must enter two returns.
As an example, note that this
will give you a single line of text:
But this
will give you two separate paragraphs:
This is a slightly odd habit to learn, but once you do, it is pretty straightforward. One nice thing is that LaTeX will take care of spacing for you. So you needn’t worry about indentation. Nor need you make sure you get two spaces after a period and only one after each word; LaTeX treats multiple spaces as if they were one, and it sorts out the spacing to make your lines look right. Additionally, LaTeX reads three or seven or twenty blank lines as if they were one; you do not have to have exactly one blank line between each paragraph, though you must have at least one blank line.
Italics and bold in LaTeX
If you want to italicize or bold some text, you have to use the proper commands. Any text you put inside the scope of a \emph{} command will be italicized; any text in the scope of a \textbf{} command will be bold. (If you were to nest \emph{} commands, however (e.g., \emph{some \emph{italicized} text}), \emph command has the effect of toggling italics (so your output would be: ’some italicized text’.) Note that on the toolbar of TeXShop there is a drop down menu called ‘Macros’; under that menu you will find a ‘Text Styles’ heading, then an ‘Emphasize’ (or ‘Typeface’ then ‘Bold’) entry. In TeXnicCenter, there is a little button on the bottom left of the toolbar that you can click to make text bold or italic, just like in Word. You’ll find something similar on most LaTeX editors.
Quotation marks
Perhaps oddly, LaTeX does not know how to handle quotation marks very well. If you type a standard double-quote mark ("), LaTeX will always compile it as closing quotation marks. So at the start of a quotation, single or double, you need to use a back tick—that looks like this ’`’ and is typically on the same key as the tilde \~. To finish a quote, you use a double apostrophe. You never use the double-quote symbol. In order to close a single-quote, you use a single apostrophe.
Fortunately, most LaTeX-specific text editors are sophisticated enough to correct this. So if you type a double-quote you’ll end up getting a pair of back ticks followed by a pair of apostrophes, with your cursor right in the middle where you want it. So while you need to be aware of this bit of archaic LaTeX behavior, it should likely not alter the way you work at all.
Sections and sub-sections
If you want to start a new section, simply type \section{Title}, filling in the title of the section. If you want a subsection, type \subsection{Title}, filling in the title. LaTeX will take care of the numbering for you.
Special symbols in LaTeX
There are some special symbols in LaTeX. If you type a percent sign, for example (%), LaTeX takes that to mean that it should ignore everything that follows on the line. So if my .tex file were to include the following:
The compiled document would look like this:
This means the above sample prologue is full of comments LaTeX will ignore. These are simply notes to explain to you what the various commands do and what your options are. LaTeX likewise gives special meaning to curly braces and amperstands. So if you want to type any of these symbols, you must escape them; that is, you must put a backslash directly in front of them: \% \{ \}. Backslashes are a different matter. They are special symbols as well. But if you backslash-escape a backslash (e.g., \\), you will get the symbol for a new line. Instead, if you need to use a backslash you must write \backslash.
Spaces
Relatedly, spaces can be slightly tricky when using LaTeX. One of the nice things about LaTeX is that a very advanced algorithm takes care of inter- and intra- word spacing. You needn’t put two spaces between sentences; LaTeX will put the best spacing between them given the context. But because of this, LaTeX is somewhat ignorant about periods: it assumes every period ends a sentence. So it will put the same amount of space between the words Mr. Jones as it does between the sentences composition. But Lewis. To get the spacing right, you need to tell LaTeX to use one space in the first case and just let it use the default behavior in the second. To do this, you would write Mr.\ Jones. The backslash tells the LaTeX compiler that you mean there to be only one space between those words. [Thanks to Gregory Wheeler for suggesting I include this here.]
If you want your spacing to be perfect, you’ll always stick a backslash after a period that does not terminate a sentence. I don’t run into occasions to do this very often. Sometimes I’ll need to do it with an etc.\ but or an et al.\ argue, but these are pretty rare. The good news (for me at least), is that if you happen to forget to use the backslash space, the spacing difference is typically not noticeable. At least, it isn’t for me. I’m sure there are some occasions where I would really want to be perfectly precise, but I usually don’t care too terribly much. In fact, I forgot about this point until Greg mentioned it to me in an email—this entire document is written without any such backslash spaces after abbreviations! Nevertheless, I thought Greg was right and I should mention it here for the sake of completeness. Consider yourself notified.
Footnotes
You must tell LaTeX about footnotes explicitly. To do this, use the \footnote{Footnote text.} command. Do not leave a space between the command and the punctuation it is to follow, else you will get an odd space. Your footnotes will be embedded in your text when you are working on your .tex file. (They’ll be lovely footnotes in the .pdf, of course.) For me, this was one of the hardest parts of the transition to LaTeX. It can be difficult to figure out where a footnote begins and ends when it is embedded in the paragraph, and it is difficult to change footnote 23 when the notes in the .tex file lack numbers. TeXShop (and TeXnicCenter, I think) have a feature that helps here: Sync. When you are in a .pdf or a .tex file, right click (or Command + click, or Control + click, depending on your setup) on any part of either file and you will be placed more or less in that same spot in the other file. It is not perfect, but it helps.
Another suggestion for dealing with footnotes: since LaTeX ignores anything after a percent sign, you can write something like the following to set your footnotes apart in the .tex file:
end of sentence.%
%
%
%
\footnote{The footnote text.}
%
%
%
[Thanks to Alex Skiles for this suggestion.]
LaTeX citations
If you like, you can do your citations like you probably used to: you can write Lewis (1986) when you want to cite On the Plurality of Worlds, and then create a section called ‘Bibliography’ where you type in the bibliographic information. A better way is to use BibTeX and BibDesk or JabRef. I’ll explain those more later.
Dashes and hypens
Finally, note that LaTeX is kind of picky about dashes and hyphens. If you want to type a hyphen, as in ‘sub-set’, you want to type a single hyphen or minus sign. If you want to type a dash between page numbers you want to type two hyphens (so 22--24). If you want an em dash, you need to type three hyphens (so that is the view---though I). And if you need a minus sign you type a hyphen within the scope of the math environment (an opening and closing dollar sign (or a \( \)) mark that environment within a paragraph, so $-3$ would give you negative three).
Ending the paper
After you have finished writing the content of your paper, you need to put a \end{document} command. Anything you put after this command will be ignored when you compile your paper.
Compiling your paper
You have written a .tex file at this point. To be honest, it is kind of an ugly mishmash of code and philosophy. It is emphatically not the finished product you are going for. (Incidentally, it does have a beauty all its own: it is a plain text file. This means that in ten years when your colleagues can no longer open their old Word documents using whatever word processor is all the rage, you will be able to open your files with ease using any text editor you like.)
To turn your paper from a .tex file to a .pdf file you need to compile it. You could do this via the command line, but TeXShop and TeXnicCenter make this easy for you. In TeXShop, just click the ‘Typeset’ button in the menu bar and then click on ‘LaTeX’. In TeXnicCenter, make sure the button in the toolbar says LaTeX => PDF, then click ‘Build’ in the toolbar and select ‘Build Output’. (I’ll discuss some of the other options later.) A little box—the console window—will pop up that prints a record of the typesetting operation (I think in TeXnicCenter, the console window might be at the bottom of the window; in TeXShop it is free floating). If everything goes according to plan, a .pdf document will pop up on your screen.
A word of warning: When you typeset your document, LaTeX has to generate a number of temporary files for its own use. It does not delete them automatically. There is a ‘Trash Aux Files’ button on the console in TeXShop that allows you to delete these files. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to put your .tex file in a folder or directory before you compile it—that way the cruft is contained and not spread all over your desktop or Documents folder.
When you write a very basic document—one with no references, internal or external—you will only need to compile it a single time. But once you start working with a bibliography or internal references to sections or footnotes, you’ll need to compile the document multiple times. This simply means you click on the Typeset -> LaTeX button twice. But we can worry about that complication later.
LaTeX error messages
There is a minor hassle with LaTeX that you tend to avoid with word processors: error messages. Sometimes things go wrong in the conversion from .tex to .pdf; when things go wrong, compiling will stop and an error message will appear in the console window. Part of really learning to use LaTeX is learning to read these error messages. And if your use of LaTeX is anything like mine, part of using LaTeX is trying hard to ignore lots of these messages! Though I am sure there is some way in which this is ill-advised, I always hit <Enter> after I get an error message. Sometimes LaTeX is just letting you know that something isn’t quite up to its rather exacting standards. In such a case, it is happy to go on compiling once you dismiss the error message. But sometimes you aren’t so lucky. Sometimes the error keeps repeating. In such cases, you can click the ‘Go to Error’ button on the console and it will usually take you to the vicinity of the offense (sometimes the errors aren’t in a specific location).
When I started using LaTeX, the vast majority of error messages I received were from brackets or commands I had forgotten to close, so that is likely a good first place for you to look. If you type \emph{ and never close that bracket, LaTeX does not know what the emphasis ranges over. So it returns an error message. Every command in the body of your paper has a range, and you will get an error unless you specify the start and the end of that range. There are two ways to do this. Inline commands—commands like \emph{} and \footnote{}—mark their range with brackets. Block commands—such as the command for a block quote or a numbered list—mark their range with \begin{} and \end{} commands. So a block quote is marked off in the following way:
\begin{quote}
The quote text.
\end{quote}
If you do not include either of those commands, you will get an error.
There are other ways in which you can make LaTeX throw an error message. This is one place LaTeX is more costly than using a word processor. One nice thing is that LaTeX will always give you an error message to let you know what is going wrong. When you are new, you won’t always be able to tell what those messages mean, but rest assured that they do mean something, and they typically mean something quite specific. Do a search on the error message and you’ll find someone online explaining how to solve your problem (here is a nice place to start your search).
Next steps
The foregoing is sufficient to get you a basic paper. But most philosophy papers will require more than this. For one thing, you want an easy way to interact with your bibliography. For another, you’ll want to double-space your paper to submit it to conferences and journals. And you might want to change the font or play around with other options. The next step I’ll cover is the bibliography. But you can click here to learn about customizing your paper.