What am I trying to do?

Remember: TeX is a typesetting program, not a word processor. The main job of TeX is to decide where symbols, such as letters, punctuation etc., should appear on the page. Typesetting is a highly developed art with many subtle points, and is much more difficult to get right than it looks.

These are the golden rules to bear in mind.

1. A document is only as good as its content. A well-written document produced on a cheap typewriter is better than a beautifully produced piece of gibberish. Your first priority should be to getting the content right.
2. Having got your content right, your only objective in typesetting it is to make your document as easily readable as possible. Don't ask yourself, 'does it look as beautiful as I can make it?' Instead ask yourself 'is it as easy to read as possible?'

LaTeX is a package extending TeX which tries to make the job of typesetting (i.e., making your document readable) easier. Nevertheless there will always be nuances in typesetting and points of style to consider. I cannot cover them all in these web pages. Indeed, after using LaTeX for over fifteen years, I do not know them all myself!

The basic idea behind LaTeX is that you should define the logical structure of the document and leave the computer to best arrange the visual appearance of your document. Until you really are making the final finishing touches to your document, your objective should be to avoid as many issue to do with visual appearance as possible. One of the strongest features of LaTeX is that it allows you to manage your documents so that cross references (theorem numbers, bibliography, page references) are generated automatically (and hence, with care, are always correct however much you change or re-order your text.) This means that a properly constructed LaTeX document can be modified easily later on without the need for a lot of minor changes.

The following tasks are typical in typesetting mathematics and are listed in approximate order of difficulty, in a scale from 1 to 6, item n+1 being approximately twice as hard as item n.

1. Simple text.
2. Simple mathematics.
3. Alignment, tables.
4. More complicated mathematics, e.g., involving alignments.
5. Document design: choice of typefaces, spacing, margins.
6. Typography: design of typefaces.

Unfortunately, most beginners try to start with the hardest things first. Don't! Even though LaTeX has a few commands which may be used to override its default action, it is always better to use the usual user-commands and then alter the way the whole document looks at the end, when the content is correct. Any fine-tuning should be done as the very last thing of all. I won't cover such fine-tuning in this course, but I will be able to offer advice to anyone who is interested.

More information: How can I best use LaTeX to describe the logical structure of my document?