Technical documents, like this one, are often divided into sections. Each section has a heading containing a title and a number for easy reference. LATEX has a series of commands that will allow you to identify different sorts of sections. Once you have done this LATEX takes on the responsibility of laying out the title and of providing the numbers.
The commands that you can use are:
The naming of these last two is unfortunate, since they do not really have anything to do with `paragraphs' in the normal sense of the word; they are just lower levels of section. In most document styles, headings made with\chapter\subsection\paragraph\section\subsubsection\subparagraph
\paragraph and \subparagraph are not numbered. \chapter
is not available in document style article. The commands should be used
in the order given, since sections are numbered within chapters, subsections
within sections, etc.
A seventh sectioning command, \part, is also available. Its use is
always optional, and it is used to divide a large document into series of
parts. It does not alter the numbering used for any of the other commands.
Including the command \tableofcontents in you document will cause a
contents list to be included, containing information collected from the various
sectioning commands. You will notice that each time your document is run
through LATEX the table of contents is always made up of the headings from
the previous version of the document. This is because LATEX collects
information for the table as it processes the document, and then includes it
the next time it is run. This can sometimes mean that the document has to be
processed through LATEX twice to get a correct table of contents.