LATEX is a computer program for typesetting documents. It takes a computer file, prepared according to the rules of LATEX and converts it to a form that may be printed on a high-quality printer, such as a laser writer, to produce a printed document of a quality comparable with good quality books and journals. Simple documents, which do not contain mathematical formulae or tables may be produced very easily: eectively all one has to do is to type the text straight in (though observing certain rules relating to quotation marks and punctuation dashes). Typesetting mathematics is somewhat more complicated, but even here LATEX is comparatively straightforward to use when one considers the complexity of some of the formulae that it has to produce and the large number of mathematical symbols which it has to produce.