Introduction to scientific working

LaTeX Document types

The first instruction in a LaTeX document tells the system which document type this document is.

(Some, not comprehensive list)

article
- used for science articles in journals, short reports
- has no title page, instead title is on first page with index or text.
- one column
- right sided, centered
scrartcl
- same as article but less strident
minimal
- sets only size of page and font
- mostly used for debugging
report
- used for longer reports, books, thesis with several chapters
- one-sided
- has title page
- one column
- right sided, centered
scrreprt
- same as report but in a way like scrartcl is to article
book
- intended for writing books
- two-sided
- one column, centered
- right sided
- title page
scrbook
- same situation for book as for scrreprt, scrartcl
amsbook
- tailored class for writing books for the needs of AMS (American Mathematical Society)
slides
- used to create presentation slides
- uses bigger sans-font letters
beamer
- used to create projector presentations
letter
- to write letters in LaTeX

In general the instruction to use LaTeX document classes is: (ex. scrbook class)

\documentclass{scrbook}

But most documentclass can be configured to change some defaults they set.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,oneside,ngerman]{scrbook}

The general syntax of LaTeX is:

\command[optional params]{parameter}

\begin{environment}[positioning on page]
...
\end{environment}

LaTeX has a lot of capabilities. In the next appointments I will try to cover the most important features and concepts in LaTeX.

Beside that, there is a good tutorial that you should follow.