If you want to learn how to write your documents with LaTeX, this introduction is for you. It contains the basic information about setting up a LaTeX system and using it to write documents. The current stable version of the package may be found on CTAN. Many translations exist (though not necessarily up to date) and can be found here.

The newest version of the document is available on GitHub. To build the document yourself you will need reasonably recent versions (mine are listed in the parentheses) of the following programs:

• TeXLive (2022, full)
• git (2.36.1)
• GNU make (4.3)
• pygments (2.12.0)

After installing them there are just three steps:

1. Clone the repository with submodules.

   git clone https://github.com/oetiker/lshort.git --recurse-submodules

2. Change to the cloned directory.

   cd lshort

3. Compile.

   make

Note that compiling for the first time takes a really long time. This is because pygments and example cache need to build. Subsequent runs should be significantly faster.

The current development builds are also available on Actions page.

See our contributing guide.

The book is released under the GPLv3 (or later) license. Full text can be found here. Copyright © 1995-2022 Tobias Oetiker, Marcin Serwin, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna, Elisabeth Schlegl and Contributors.

The title page illustration by Roman Schmid is dedicated to the public domain via CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.