Using LaTeX to describe logical structure

When you are typesetting in LaTeX (how do I pronnounce that?) you should put the focus of your attention on describing the logical structure of the document as clearly as possible, and leaving LaTeX itself to do the visual formatting, the choice of fonts and the positioning of characters on the page.

Remember that the most important thing about your document is its content, so leaving LaTeX to deal with the fiddly stuff like visual formatting lets you concentrate on the most important thing of all. However, for longer or more complex documents, or documents that are being developed and will be the subject of many changes and revisions over the course of months or years this approach becomes more and more important.

For example, it may be that a key definition you introduce in chapter 3 as "definition 3.1" is needed in chapter 2 of a later version of your document. You move it to chapter 2 and need to change all the labels of all your definitions. If you were careful to start with, LaTeX can do all this for you automatically. Or perhaps you chose a notation for a certain mathematical function, and at a later time decided that that notation is not appropriate. Depending on how you set up your LaTeX source, you might be able to do this by changing a single line of code only.

Here are a few golden rules about describing logical structure in LaTeX:

• Whatever you do, be consistent throughout your document.
• Keep things simple. The reader can easily be "trained" into understanding the meaning of a small number of typographic constructions, but a large number of them can be confusing.
• Use the LaTeX environments and commands given wherever possible. Don't invent new ones when the standard ones will do, or will nearly do.
• You should think about commands and environments in terms of what they describe, not how their output looks like by default. (All of these defaults can be changes easily enough if you really wish.)
• Whenever you find you are using the same construction or notation regularly, write a macro or environment for it.
• Don't use plain TeX commands (just about all of these are about visual formatting, and there can occasionally be name-conflicts between plain TeX and LaTeX), and avoid LaTeX commands for visual formatting whenever you can. For example, many beginners regularly sprinkle their source with \\ commands and \noindent. This is visual formatting!
• If you do need to change the default styles or visually format your document differently, write a special custom style file to do it, and keep all these commands in that file, rather than sprinkled throughout your main document.

(Some of these activities are somewhat "advanced", and I will help Birmingham Maths students with these if you would like me to.)

LaTeX has environments describing the type of the current part of the document. (In fact, the whole document is itself and environment called document.) The real power of environments is that they can be nested. You can have a quotation environment in item 2 of a description environment, and so on.

In fact, the best LaTeX code is when these environments are nested in the most logical way possible. Not only is the source easier to read, but LaTeX itself is much more successful at formatting it in a pleasing way.

These features of LaTeX should be familiar to anyone who knows HTML or XML well. (In fact, XML is designed to describe document structure in a similar way, and—mainly because XML is designed to do essentially nothing else—XML is somewhat better at document description.)

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