LaTeX Starting and Ending

Your input to LaTeX must contain the following commands as a minimum:

\documentclass[options]{class}
\begin{document}
  ... your text goes here ...
\end{document}

Here options is a comma-separated list of optional arguments, and class is the name of one of the available classes. The standard distribution contains the following ones: article, report, book, slides, and letter, see Document Classes. The option list is different for each class, some general options are:

11pt, or 12pt to increase font size;
a4paper to give paper size

You may include other LaTeX commands between \documentclass and \begin{document}. This is the so-called preamble containing global parameters (such as width and height of the text, headers and footers) and especially the used packages.

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