8.5 Marking up Text for TEX and LATEX
GNU Emacs provides excellent support for marking up TEX files. Most people today use LATEX , which is written in TEX and provides more control over formatting. As a result, we'll talk about LaTeX mode here.
Before we launch into this discussion, we assume that you have set up LATEX on your platform. On Red Hat Linux, it's set up by default. Windows and Mac OS X users must install and configure LATEX before proceeding.[53]
Emacs attempts to guess whether you're editing a TEX or LATEX file and enter the appropriate mode. You can force LaTeX mode if Emacs doesn't enter it automatically by typing M-x latex-mode Enter.
8.5.1 Matching Braces
LATEX commands often take the form \keyword{text}. LaTeX mode doesn't try to figure out if you're using the "right" keywords since the language is extensible and you may have defined your own keywords. It does, however, provide support for avoiding the most common error: mismatched curly braces and dollar signs.
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TEI Emacs, mentioned earlier in this chapter, automatically sets up the environment for you and adds more features including Auctex, a complete authoring environment that supports many TEX variants as well as bibcite/bibtex for generating bibliographies. However, LaTeX mode under TEI Emacs appears to be a different beast from Emacs LaTeX mode, and we do not describe it here.