1 About this document

This is an unofficial reference manual for the LaTeX2e document preparation system, which is a macro package for the TeX typesetting program (see Overview of LaTeX).

This document’s home page is https://latexref.xyz; it has separate web pages for each topic. Alternatively. https://latexref.xyz/dev/latex2e.html has the entire document on a single page. For other output formats, the sources, and plenty more information, see https://latexref.xyz/dev/.

In this document, we will mostly just use ‘LaTeX’ rather than ‘LaTeX2e’, since the previous version of LaTeX (2.09) was frozen decades ago.

LaTeX is maintained by a group of volunteers (https://latex-project.org). The official documentation written by the LaTeX project is available from their web site. The present document is completely unofficial and has not been written or reviewed by the LaTeX maintainers. Do not send bug reports or anything else about this document to them. Instead, please send all comments to . This is a public list; you can (un)subscribe, view the archives, etc., at https://lists.tug.org/latexrefman.

This document is a reference, not a tutorial. There is a vast array of other information available about LaTeX, at all levels. Here are a few introductions.

https://ctan.org/pkg/latex-doc-ptr

Two pages of recommended references to LaTeX documentation.

https://ctan.org/pkg/first-latex-doc

Writing your first document, with a bit of both text and math.

https://ctan.org/pkg/lshort

A longer introduction to LaTeX, translated to many languages.

https://tug.org/begin.html

Overview of getting started with TeX and LaTeX.


Unofficial LaTeX2e reference manual