Hello

Your question is not completely clear to me. I take it that you have
just recently heard of LaTeX and you don't know exactly what it is.

On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 03:45:05PM -0400, trajan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>    Wanted to post a LaTeX-related question.  Is LaTex part
> of the Emacs application or package?

No they are separate. LaTeX is a program, or better a complex set of
programs, completely running in a terminal. What it does, is compiling
a specially prepared clear-text source file what produces a nicely
typeset and printable output file (e.g. a pdf file). The source file
is written in a special markup language looking somewhat similar to
html.

Here Emacs comes into play. In fact, it doesn't matter which editor is
used to write the input file. You can even write it in MS-Word if you
are a masochist and as long as you save the file in clear text. But
it's better to use an editor which offers special functions for LaTeX.
The editor also should have a proper syntax highlighting in order to
distinguish between actual text (i.e. what you want to say) and LaTeX
code (i.e. what you want it to look like) in your source file more
easily. Emacs is, to my knowledge, the most powerful tool to do that.

> If not, can it be after installing and configuring?  I'm running
> Emacs v.21 on a Mac OS Terminal window.  Any information is
> appreciated.  Thanks.

What you have to do, is downloading a TeX distribution for Mac from a
CTAN repository near your place. Just google for "texlive mac
download". TeXLive is the distribution mostly used today (I
think). TeTeX is another distribution that is still widely in use (but
will be outdated in the near future). Both are available for Mac.

As far as I know, there is nothing special to be configured, if you
install (La)TeX on a system that has Emacs already installed. Emacs
reads the necessary information from the shell variables and finds the
binaries accordingly (I may be wrong with this explanation, anyway). 

Emacs switches to the LaTeX mode as soon as you open a file 
ending in .tex. To find out what is the best way to use Emacs for
LaTeX files, please refer to
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/AUCTeX.

You still have to learn what a LaTeX source file has to look
like. There are many tutorials for beginners on the web. Best way
might be to start with Wikipedia.

I hope that I didn't misunderstand you and that this was helpful. 

Greetings,

Sven