Basics

• Extra spaces and extra empty lines are ignored. One empty line marks a new paragraph.
• In TeX all characters between a percentage sign, %, and the end of the line are comments, and therefore ignored.
  If you want to use a % in your document, you should type \%. The same applies for some other character that have a special meaning for TeX, e.g., $, ^, _, &, #.
  Exception: the character \ can be obtained with $\backslash$ (this is in math-mode).
• Commands start with a backslash, \.
  Warning: the space after a command (e.g, \TeX) is always used to determine the end of it, hence it is not displayed. You can either put a "void string", {}, or require a space, (a space preceded by a backslash, \ ) if this is not what you want. See the example.
• Arguments are usually enclosed in curly or square brackets (i.e., {} or []). Square brackets denote optional arguments.