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Text and simple text effects

Special characters

Except for the commands marked by the backslash, most characters will be typeset by LaTeX as normal text. There are a few exceptions:

• A blank line separates two paragraphs.
• Any whitespace (tab, space, newline) count as a single space (except for the blank line for paragraphs above).
• Some characters have a special meaning, and work as markup commands: &, $, _, \, ^, ~, #, {, }.
• Most of the special characters can be typeset by preceeding them by a backslash: \&, \$, \_, \^, \~, \#, \{, \}. This does not work for backslash (\) though.
• The easiest way to typeset a backslash is $\backslash$.

Fonts and text types

Choosing fonts is a difficult task, best left for experts. The standard setup uses a selection of fonts which work well together. Although it is no longer difficult to choose your own fonts and make an inconsistent, unprofessional layout, this is no place to explain how.

What you need to know is a few functional markup commands for emphasis et c. The following commands take a single argument which is set in a different style:

\emph{text}

Emphasis. Usually in italics.

\textbf{text}

Boldface

\textsc{text}

Small capitals

\textsf{text}

Sans serif

\texttt{text}

Typewriter

Most classes have different size options (10pt, 11pt, 12pt) to change the main text size in the document. For instance

  \documentclass[11pt]{cssurrey}

Since you use special sectioning commands for headers, it is unlikely that you need to change the text size inside the document. If you happen to need it, it would look like this:
{\large large text}
Smaller text can be achieved by \small \footnotesize, or \tiny; and even larger by \Large, \LARGER, \huge, or \Huge.

For computer code and mathematics, you should see separate sections.