Linux with Operating System Concepts

text to be underlined
} or to center 
justify a section of text, you would use 
\begin{center}
text to be centered
\
end{center}
.
You place your text document, along with the LaTeX commands, in a text file and then 
process it using the latex command from the command-line prompt. LaTeX allows you to 
draw figures using postscript or include figures already stored in postscript. LaTeX also 
automatically generates bibliographies for you as long as you have set up a reference library 
by using the bibtex program.
Table 5.2 provides a description of some of the most useful formatting and document 
commands. Figure 5.7 provides an example of both a latex file and the document that latex 
generates from the file. The top portion of Figure 5.7 provides a short latex document to 
illustrate the use of the embedded commands. The bottom portion of Figure 5.7 is the fin-
ished document.
Aside from the commands shown in Figure 5.7, there are hundreds of other commands 
available in LaTeX. The font style commands use the format 
\
style
{text}
such as \
em{hi there}
or 
\bf{This is rather Bold!}
. Styles for \bf, \em, \it, \rom, \sl, \sc, 
and \tt are shown below.
Bold face
Emphasis
Roman font face
Slant
CAPS
Teletype
Italics
FIGURE 5.6 
Several OpenOffice software titles.

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Linux Applications
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To use LaTeX, you would first create your document. Normally, you would save this 
document as a .tex document. Tex is a more primitive program that LaTeX calls upon; so, 
you could actually use Tex commands but LaTeX is far easier to work with unless you had 
to work at a very primitive level of formatting.
Next, given your .tex file, issue your latex command: 
latex 
filename
.tex
. As long 
as there are no errors encountered, LaTeX then produces at least one file, 
filename
.dpi. The 
dpi extension stands for “device independent” meaning that it could then be used by one of 
several other programs. To view your document or print it out, you must use an additional 
program. One such program is 
dvi2ps
to create a postscript file. Today, it is more com-
mon to use 
dvipdf
to create a pdf version.
Once the pdf is created, you can view and/or print out the file. LaTeX will also generate 
other files as needed, including 
filename
.log and 
filename
.aux. The log file contains com-
ments generated by LaTeX while the aux file may contain any error messages generated.
Another useful feature of LaTeX is the easy ability to insert references. First, create one 
or more bibliography files, known as bibtex files. These files contain the reference informa-
tion that you might refer to in any given document. A bibliographical reference in your 
bibtex file will contain information such as the authors, title, book or journal name, vol-
ume, year, pages, editor, and address. Each entry is preceded by the type of reference such 
as article, book, or collection. What follows is an example of an entry for a journal article. 
TABLE 5.2 
Some LaTeX Commands of Note (not included in Figure 5.6)