Typing structured text

Usually, long documents have a structure: they are organized in chapters, sections and subsections, they contain different types of text, such as regular text, citations, footnotes, theorems, etc. After selecting a document style in Document→Style, TeXmacs takes care of specific layout issues, such as numbering of sections, pages, theorems, typesetting citations and footnotes in a nice way and so on.

Currently, four standard document styles have been implemented: letter, article, book and seminar. The seminar style is used for making transparencies. As soon as you have selected such a style, you can organize your text into sections (see Text→Section) and use specific environments. Examples of environments are theorem, proposition, remark and so on (see Text→Environment). Other examples are lists of items (see Text→Itemize) or numbered lists (see Text→Enumerate).

When you get more acquainted with TeXmacs, it is possible to add your own new environments in your own style file. Assume for instance that you often make citations and that you want those to appear in italic, with left and right margins of 1cm. Instead of manually changing the text and paragraph properties each time you make a citation, it is better to create a citation environment. Not only it will be faster to create a new citation when doing so, but it is also possible to systematically change the layout of your citations throughout the document just by changing the definition of the citation environment. The latter situation occurs for instance if you discover a posteriori that you prefer the citations to appear in a smaller font.