The typesetting system offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing of tables and figures, chapter and section headings, graphics, page layout, indexing and bibliographies. In the latter role, for example, it is sometimes used as part of a pipeline for translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF. LaTeX can be used as a standalone document preparation system, or as an intermediate format. LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language. It also has a prominent role in the preparation and publication of books and articles that contain complex multilingual materials, such as Arabic and Greek. LaTeX is widely used in academia for the communication and publication of scientific documents in many fields, including mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics, chemistry, economics, linguistics, quantitative psychology, philosophy, and political science. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file (such as PDF or DVI) suitable for printing or digital distribution.

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The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document (such as bold and italics), and to add citations and cross-references. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. LaTeX ( / ˈ l ɑː t ɛ x/ LAH-tekh or / ˈ l eɪ t ɛ x/ LAY-tekh, often stylized as L aT eX) is a software system for document preparation.

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