LaTeX Tutorial

When I give this tutorial, I gave a very high level overview of LaTeX for a couple minutes at the beginning of the hour. Here are the main points:

  • The link opens my tutorial in Overleaf, which is an online platform for editing LaTeX. You can create an account, in which case the project gets saved as your project. If you don’t want to create an account, you should download your files if you want to keep the changes.
  • In LaTeX, you type a text file ending in .tex, and it gets compiled into a PDF file based on the commands you type.
  • In the file, there’s a preamble (consisting of setup commands) before \begin{document}. The easiest way to deal with this is to copy a file that is set up well, and starting working after \begin{document}. The file ends with \end{document}.
  • The rest of the document is the main document. If you type text here, it will get typeset in paragraphs.
  • There are two modes of text entry: text mode and math mode. Text mode is what happens by default.
  • There are two ways to enter math mode. One is inline math mode. You begin this mode with a $ and end with a $. For example, “my equation is $a+b=c$ and I love it.”
  • The other is display math mode. This creates a displayed equation set apart on its own line, centered. There are examples in the tutorial file above.
  • Dive in and work through things!