$\LaTeX$ Introduction¶
This is an introduction to $\LaTeX$ for those who have little to no experience in writing a document using it.
Setup:
- Install LaTex on your device from https://www.latex-project.org/get/. You may also want to install a $\LaTeX$ editor such as TeXMaker or MikTeX.
- Alternatively, register an account for LaTex online service like overleaf https://www.overleaf.com. Overleaf has a free-to-use service which is sufficient for most purposes.
Overview:
These lessons cover a simple getting-started guide to creating documents with $\LaTeX$. There will be some examples and exercises along the way for you to try, along with code samples that you can render on your local machine.
That being said, you'll get much more use out of these lessons if you are typesetting something that's useful to you. As such, we recommend that you find an old document of yours (like a final year project, a research paper you are particularly fond of, or some lecture notes from an old course) to lift your own prose, equations, and chapter stylings from. That way, you can experiment with the commands we are showing you in a context that will be useful to you, rather the examples we present where we have to cover all bases!
The best way to learn $\LaTeX$ is to experiment - whilst there are a few exercises that appear throughout the lessons, the best way for you to get to grips with $\LaTeX$ is to follow along yourself, but don't blindy copy-and-paste what you're being shown. After all, the primary goal of this course is to make you familiar with typesetting your work in $\LaTeX$, so you should try to use some of your own documents/work as a basis for these lessons!
Schedule:
| Time | Lesson | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Introduction | An introduction to what $\LaTeX$ is, how it works, and why we use it for creating scientific documents. |
| 0:20 | Writing mathematics | Using math environments to write mathematics in a $\LaTeX$ document. |
| 1:05 | Structured documents | Structuring your documents by adding sections, and using labels to cross-reference parts of your document. |
| 1:25 | Pictures | Handling images in a $\LaTeX$ document using graphicx and the figure environment. |
| 1:45 | Referencing | Adding a bibliography to your documents using BibTeX. |
Completing the first set of lessons should take approximately 2 hours.
More advanced topics¶
The first 5 lessons will provide you with the teaching to begin writing documents in $\LaTeX$, however will not cover some of the more useful (but more advanced) functionality. For those who are interested, there are a couple of further lessons which start to explore this functionality. Please make sure you are comfortable with the material in all of the above lessons, and in particular we strongly recommend you use a local $\LaTeX$ editor for these lessons, because the content of most of them focuses on the preamble and file structure, rather than the content of the documents themselves.
| Time | Lesson | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2:00 | Macros | Making your own custom commands in $\LaTeX$. |
| 2:40 | Multiple Files | Using multiple files to create and handle long documents. |
These additional lessons are designed to last a further 1 hour, but may take longer if you wish to explore the features that they dicuss fully.
References
Further information can be found in the following resources:
-https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Free_online_introduction_to_LaTeX_(part_1)
-https://people.bath.ac.uk/jdb55/samba_training/samba-training/files/Maths_in_LaTeX.pdf