MATH on the WEB: LaTeX Lesson 7
More about LaTeX

Goals to accomplish in this lesson

  1. Learn about page styles in LaTeX
  2. Learn about macros in LaTeX

In-class Activities

Continue with LaTeX

Pagestyles in LaTeX

You may want to change the page style of your LaTeX document. This can be done with the commands \pagestyle and \thispagestyle. The command \pagestyle changes the page style of the current page and and of all subsequent pages, whereas the command \thispagestyle changes only the page style of the current page.

The standard LaTeX page styles are:

empty
Both the header and footer are empty
plain
The header is empty and the footer contains the page number
headings
The header contains information determined by the document class and the page number; the footer is empty
myheadings
Similar to headings, but the user controls the header

you can use the \pagenumbering{style} command to select a display style for the page numbers. The default style is arabic, but for an introduction you might want to use roman, which gives i, ii, iii, iv, and so on. Also available are Roman, Alph and alph. It is easy to guess what they do>

To get a page break, use the command \clearpage.

LaTeX Cross references

One of the most useful features of LaTeX is its easy-to-use cross reference system. To allow cross-references to some element of your document, you can assign the element a "key" given by a "key-string", which is a string that can consist of letters, digits and punctuation. That key-string can later be referred to generate a cross-reference elsewhere to the original element. The elements that are commonly labelled are equations, sections and subsections (etc.), figures and tables.

Here is an example of an equation with a label and a reference to the equation. This is taken from Section 4.2 of LaTeX, a Document Preparation System by Leslie Lamport, ©1994, 1985 by Addison-Wesley. 

Equation~\ref{eq:euler}
Section~\ref{sec-early} below
...
\subsection{Early Results}
\label{sec-early}
Euler's equation
\begin{equation}
  e^{i\pi}+1 = 0 \label{eq:euler}
\end{equation}
combines the five most important numbers in mathematics in a single 
equation.
The results, depending on what numbering scheme was chosen in the document preamble, might look as follows:

LaTeX reference typeset

Finished?

If you have done all the above activities, and there is still time left, here are some other activities you can do.

Homework for after class

You should have time to start on these during class.

  1. Explore any mathematical topic that interests you, with a view to using what you can find out about it as part of a project
  2. Keep a list of links to any mathematical sites that you think are worth revisiting. Include the list of links either on your very basic Web page or as a separate document linked to that Web page.
  3. For Wednesday, Novemeber 10, write a short paper in LaTeX designed to teach a first year student the how and why of completing the square. There are many Web pages that deal with this, but most are not impressive, and a few actually have mistakes in them. The paper should be one-and-a-half to two pages in length, or so. Make sure that you have at least three numbered equations in your paper, and that you have at least two cross references to your equations (so these will need labels). I hope that you will also use the sectioning command.

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