LaTeX offers some logical markup for the title of documents: three commands to set up ‘meta-data’ and one to use it.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
\author{A.~N.~Other \and D.~Nobacon}
\title{Some things I did}
\date{1st April 2020}
\maketitle
Some normal text.
\end{document}
As you can see, the commands \author, \title and \date save information,
and \maketitle uses it. You can also separate multiple authors with \and.
The commands \author, \title and \date need to come before \maketitle.
Here, we’ve given them in the document body: they can also be used in the
preamble, but if you use babel shortcuts they won’t be active there.
The design provided by \maketitle depends on the document class (see lesson
5). There is a titlepage environment for when you want to do
custom design, but this is out of the scope of this introduction. If you want
to do your own document designs you can either use a customisable class, such
as memoir, or start with one of LaTeX’s base classes, like book and use it
as a starting point.
In addition to the “ordered” and “unordered” types of lists, LaTeX provides another one, less common: the “descriptive lists”.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
\item[Dog:] member of the genus Canis, which forms part of the wolf-like canids,
and is the most widely abundant terrestrial carnivore.
\item[Cat:] domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only
domesticated species in the family Felidae and is often referred to as the
domestic cat to distinguish it from the wild members of the family.
\end{description}
\end{document}
Try setting up different \author, \title and \date information to test
out \maketitle. Which of them do you have to give? Do the commands have to
have an author, a title and a date in them?
Make some descriptive lists, and nest some of them inside another ones (ordered, unordered or descriptive).