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LatineSummary
This lesson opens the second unit of the course, devoted to the text. It explains what the unit is for: to move from a document that compiles to a text typeset with the care that academic writing demands, in any of its languages and scripts; it presents its four lessons and the thread that joins them, from paragraphs, spaces and punctuation to notes, quotations and verse; it specifies what is taken for granted from the previous unit; it recalls where the typographic conventions that the unit teaches us to respect come from; it states the problem the unit solves, that a text typed with the habits of the typewriter compiles without errors and is, nevertheless, badly typeset; and it shows that these conventions serve the sciences as much as the humanities.
Learning objectives
- Describe the sequence of contents of the unit and explain what each lesson contributes to the next.
- Recognise what the unit takes for granted from the previous one and review it if necessary.
- Explain, with an example, why a text that compiles without errors may be badly typeset.
- Recognise in the different disciplines the conventions of text composition that the unit teaches.
Entry assessment
Before working through the unit, it is worth measuring the starting point. This assessment is a self-assessment: it is not graded, and its only purpose is to guide your study. Its first two questions review what the unit takes for granted from the previous one; the next eight cover, two by two and in order, the four lessons of the unit. Anyone who has never paid attention to these details should not expect to get them right: every answer, right or wrong, explains the point and names the lesson that deals with it. The same skills are measured again at the end, in the synthesis lesson.
Before starting the unit, measure your starting point. It is a short self-assessment: it is not graded and its result is stored only in your browser.
Question 1From earlier unitsWhat does the line
I use \TeX for everything.print, written as it stands in the body of a document?The space that follows a control word does not reach the text: the engine consumes it when it reads the name of the command.The command ends without error at the space; the problem is that it consumes it, and that is why it goes unnoticed.The backslash is not printed: it begins a command, and\TeXis a known command, which prints the logo.\TeXis a control word: its name ends at the first character that is not a letter, and the space that follows it is consumed as the signal of that end. One writes\TeX{} foror\TeX\ for.Review: Anatomy of a document
Question 2From earlier unitsThe text of a report contains, written as it stands, the file name
data_2024.csv. What happens on compiling?The underscore is one of the ten reserved characters: written as it stands, it is not printed.That is what the percent sign would do, since it begins a comment; the underscore produces an error.The engine does not replace one reserved character with another: it interprets it according to its function, and here that function exists only in formulas.The underscore writes subscripts inside formulas; in the text, the engine assumes that a formula has not been opened. One writes\_, and the unit devoted to structure will show more convenient ways of writing file names.Review: Anatomy of a document
Question 3To separate the paragraphs of an essay, an author ends each one with
\\and goes on writing on the next line, without leaving blank lines. What is obtained?They are not: the blank line ends the paragraph, and\\only breaks a line within it. The difference shows in the missing indentation.\\is a valid command within a paragraph; the engine accepts it, and that is why the oversight goes unnoticed.\\adds no vertical space and opens no paragraphs; it only forces the line break.\\breaks the line within the paragraph; a new paragraph is opened with a blank line, and then the class gives it its indentation and its spacing. If, in addition, the last line of each passage is short, the log usually shows “Underfull” warnings.Question 4A piece of work written with LuaLaTeX and fontspec follows the editorial convention that joins the ends of ranges with the en dash, longer than the hyphen. How is the page range 12 to 15 written in the source?
The hyphen is the shortest sign; some house styles tolerate it in ranges, but the convention the work follows asks for the en dash.Three hyphens make the em dash, the longest sign, which marks off parenthetical remarks and is not used in ranges.The tilde is a space that prevents a line break; a space would appear between the numbers, not a sign.With the text fonts loaded by fontspec, two hyphens in a row become the en dash; the Unicode character can also be typed directly. English style guides require the en dash in ranges, although some house styles tolerate the hyphen: what matters is to choose a convention and keep to it.Question 5In an essay in English, a short Latin phrase appears in the middle of a paragraph. How should it be marked, if babel already declares Latin as a secondary language?
\selectlanguageis a declaration that changes the language of everything that follows, not only of the phrase; it serves for long passages, and one would have to return to English afterwards.Italics are a decision of form; they do not tell the engine what language the phrase is in, and the words would be hyphenated according to the rules of English.babel does not guess the language: it applies the one that is declared, and without a mark the phrase is treated as English.\foreignlanguagetakes an argument and its effect is confined to it: the Latin words are hyphenated according to the rules of Latin, without the rest of the paragraph changing.Review: Languages and fonts
Question 6A preamble contains
\babelfont[ancientgreek]{rm}{GFS Didot}. What does that line do?That is what\setmainfont{GFS Didot}would do, or\babelfont{rm}{GFS Didot}without a language; the square brackets confine the change to Ancient Greek.babel translates nothing: it applies to each passage the conventions of the language declared for it and, with this line, a font.A line of the source installs nothing; the font must already be in the distribution or on the system, and if it is not, the compilation reports it.With\babelfontand a language in square brackets, babel changes font every time it enters that language, for example inside\foreignlanguage{ancientgreek}{…}. Thus a main font without Greek letters can live alongside another that has them.Review: Languages and fonts
Question 7Within a passage that is already in italics, for example the title of a work, a word is highlighted with
\emph. How does that word look?That would happen with\textit, which always sets italics;\emphalternates with its surroundings.\emphdoes not use bold; it alternates between italic and upright according to the text around it.There is no error at all: nesting emphasis is legitimate, and the class decides how it looks.\emphmarks an emphasis, not italics: in upright text it sets italics, and in italic text it returns to upright. That is why it says what the word is and not how it looks.Review: Formatting with meaning
Question 8An author writes
Before \large{big} and after.in the middle of a paragraph, thinking that only “big” will change size. What happens?That is how a command with an argument would work, such as\textbf{…}; the size commands are declarations.There is no error: the braces are read as an ordinary group, and the oversight goes unnoticed.A group cancels what is declared inside it, not what was declared before; here the declaration is outside.The braces that follow\largeare not its argument, but a group that comes after the declaration; the change of size has already taken place outside it. One writes{\large big}, or better a command that says what that word is.Review: Formatting with meaning
Question 9A verbatim quotation of three paragraphs is set off from the main text. Which LaTeX environment is appropriate?
quotedoes not indent the first line of paragraphs, so that in a quotation of several paragraphs they are hard to tell apart; it is meant for short quotations.Centring is not quoting:centercentres each line and does not indent the margins as a quotation does.A quotation of three paragraphs does not fit within a paragraph; long quotations are set off, without quotation marks.The basic classes offer two environments:quote, for a short quotation or a series of short quotations, without paragraph indentation, andquotation, for quotations of several paragraphs, which keep their indentation.Review: Notes, quotations and verse
Question 10In the
verseenvironment, which typesets poems, how are lines and stanzas separated?A blank line opens a paragraph, which inverseis a stanza: each line would become a stanza of a single line.A line break in the source counts as a space: the lines would run together into a single line.\newlinebreaks the line just as\\does, without the space that separates one stanza from another; what separates the stanzas is the blank line.Withinverse, a line of verse is a line of a paragraph, and the stanza is the paragraph:\\breaks the lines, and the blank line opens the next stanza, with its space.Review: Notes, quotations and verse
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