Lshort started as a translation and rationalisation of a ground-breaking German-language introduction to LaTeX. It has since taken on a momentum of its own, and has itself been translated into a number of languages. Thus we have introductory text available to a wide proportion of the user community. The archive holds versions in Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian and Vietnamese.

The author is Tobias Oetiker.