title: LaTeX in 24 Hours: A Practical Guide for Scientific Writing
author: Dilip Datta
description: This book presents direct and concise explanations and examples to many LaTeX syntax and structures, allowing students and researchers to quickly understand the basics that are required for writing and preparing book manuscripts, journal articles, reports, presentation slides and academic theses and dissertations for publication.
zlib_text: © Springer International Publishing AG 2017
  
  Dilip DattaLaTeX in 24 Hours10.1007/978-3-319-47831-9_1
  
  Hour 1
  
  # 1\. Introduction
  
  Dilip Datta1
  
  (1)
  
  Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam, India
  
  Dilip Datta
  
  Email: [ddatta@tezu.ernet.in](mailto:ddatta@tezu.ernet.in)
  
  Email: [datta_dilip@rediffmail.com](mailto:datta_dilip@rediffmail.com)
  
  ## 1.1 What Is LaTeX?
  
  Donald E. Knuth developed TeX in the year 1977 as a typesetting system for
  preparing books, especially those containing a lot of mathematical
  expressions. Based on it, Leslie Lamport developed LaTeX (named as LaTeX 2.09)
  in 1985 for preparing documents by concentrating on the structure of a
  document rather than on its formatting details. LaTeX 2.09 was enhanced in
  1994 as LaTeX 2![$$\\varepsilon $$](A431553_1_En_1_Chapter_IEq1.gif) by a
  group of developers led by Frank Mittelbach.
  
  LaTeX is a macro-package used as a language-based approach for typesetting
  documents. Various LaTeX instructions are 