Producing a Simple Document

It is very easy to use LaTeX to produce simple documents containing text with occasional headings. You put

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{a4}
\begin{document}

at the top and

\end{document}

at the end. If you want to have numbered section headings in the text use the command

            \section{This is the Text of the Heading}

If you don't want the numbering, use \section* instead of \section. The text of the document is just typed in as normal except that each time you want to start a new paragraph you should leave a blank line.

There are a small number of characters which have special meanings in LaTeX so if you need to use them they will need to be entered specially into your file. The characters are:

       &   $   #   %   _   {   }   ^   ~   \

If you really need any of the first seven of these they can be inserted by typing the two character combinations shown below.

      \&  \$  \#  \%  \_  \{  \}

The `\' character is used in each case to tell LaTeX that the character that comes next should not have its special meaning in this case. When you are happy with the document, save it. There's no need to shut down the editor.