Tables and Bibliography

In many wordprocessors, students must spend considerable time creating formatted items such as tables, as well as organizing bibliographic references. In L^ATEX, these operations are relatively simple.

The general format for setting up a table is to define a table using "l", "r", or "c" for positioning and vertical bar for column lines. The ampersand & is used to separate items and the "hline" tag for row lines. The code below is used to define the table comparing the advantages of various word processing products:

      \begin{center}
      \begin{tabular}{r|lcc|}\hline
      No. & Formatting Language & Cost & Utility \\ \hline \hline
      1. & HTML & free & fair \\ \hline
      2. & LaTeX & free & good \\ \hline
      3. & Microsoft Word & expensive & good \\ \hline
      4. & vi & free & poor \\ \hline
      5. & Word Perfect 5.1 & cheap & fair \\ \hline
      \end{tabular}
      \end{center}

The actual table looks like the following:

No.	Formatting Language	Cost	Utility
1.	HTML	free	fair
2.	LaTeX	free	good
3.	Microsoft Word	expensive	good
4.	vi	free	poor
5.	Word Perfect 5.1	cheap	fair

Bibliographic references are very handy since L^ATEX coordinates any citations in the text to the bibliograph list. Each bibliography reference needs to have an identifier such as $\backslash$bibitem{RefID} $<$reference info$>$ in the bibliography, and then anytime that reference is cited with the proper $\backslash$cite{RefID}, L^ATEX will handle all the coordination and numbering of items in the list.