Other Things to Look At

L^ATEX can print both opening and closing quote characters, and can manage either of these either single or double. To do this it uses the two quote characters from your keyboard: ` and '. You will probably think of ' as the ordinary single quote character which probably looks like  or on your keyboard, and ` as a ``funny'' character that probably appears as . You type these characters once for single quote (see line 21), and twice for double quotes (see line 20). The double quote character " itself is almost never used.

L^ATEX can produce three different kinds of dashes. A long dash, for use as a punctuation symbol, as is typed as three dash characters in a row, like this `---' (see line 23). A shorter dash, used between numbers as in `10–20', is typed as two dash characters in a row, while a single dash character is used as a hyphen.

>From time to time you will need to include one or more of the L^ATEX special symbols in your text. Seven of them can be printed by making them into commands by proceeding them by backslash (see line 36). The remaining three symbols can be produced by more advanced commands, as can symbols that do not appear on your keyboard such as , , §, £, ©, and ♣.

It is sometimes useful to include comments in a L^ATEX file, to remind you of what you have done or why you did it. Everything to the right of a % sign is ignored by L^ATEX, and so it can be used to introduce a comment.