Intro to LaTeX

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• Authors: Curtis
• Research field: Democracy and Information Systems, Sustainability and Software
• Lesson topic: Getting Started with LaTeX
• Lesson content URL: https://github.com/UofTCoders/studyGroup/tree/gh-pages/lessons/misc/latex-intro

Preface:

This is a very basic introduction to LaTeX, a markup language for document preparation. LaTeX is a popular and widely loved way of writing not only scientific and mathematical papers, but for creating beautiful documents on many types. LaTeX gives users a lot of power over their documents, but has a bit of a learning curve. This workshop is designed to give you a leg up on that!

This lesson has been cobbled together from many pieces of advice from my experience and from across the LaTeX user community.

No downloads are needed for this lesson, but making an account at ShareLaTeX will allow you to follow along and see what’s going on.

Lesson Overview:

This lesson covers:

• What is LaTeX and what it is for
• The different parts of a TeX file
  • The preamble
  • Packages
  • Common environments
• Compiling and troubleshooting
• Where to learn more