These were written to accompany a GBM tutorial by Mike Wahl and Dan Waxman, but hopefully should be a decent reference in the future regardless. We'll also embed a recording of the meeting later. There's a corresponding document here, but most examples can be edited from this webpage directly. This differs a bit from the actual presentation and the corresponding document due to some limitations, but is mostly the same.
What is LATEX?
LATEX (pronounced to rhyme with "tech") is a markup language, similar in theory to HTML/CSS. Just as the internet is built upon HTML/CSS, high-quality typeset papers in math and physics are often built upon LATEX. It builds upon TEX, built by Don Knuth in the late 70s and 80s, after getting annoyed with the typesetting issues writing the first few volumes of The Art of Computer Programming. Somewhat confusingly, we type out our documents in LATEX, then pass it to a program named something similar like pdfTeX, which converts our markup into a pretty, readable format. In physics classes, most people end up using LATEX for professional-looking lab reports, but people also make beautiful lecture notes and awesome resumes.
Why do we use it?
Simply put, it makes life easier. Juxtaposed to many word processors, LATEX
just works; after learning what you should type, it's not very often you have to change anything for it to render nicely, it's already nice. Instead of taking ten minutes to type the wave equation, it takes ten seconds and looks great. In order to render
we just need to type
∖nabla^2f=∖frac{1}{c^2}∖frac{∖partial^2f}{∖partialt^2}.Packages
One of the most miraculous aspects of LATEX is the community surrounding it. While some things are somewhat cumbersome in straight-up LATEX, we can use some other people's code to make our lives easier with packages.
At the top of the reference document, you'll see a number of packages being used. Things like graphicx make inserting figures easy, while other packages like siunitx help make the process of writing out units much easier.
General Navigation
Like anything else, there's some general structure to LATEX documents: we put stuff about how we want our document to look in the preamble, then the rest of our code in the body. There's also math mode and text mode; in text mode you type normally, but in math mode, which you access by typing $stuff here$, you can type math expressions like we'll see below.
In LATEX, there's also environments, which we'll explore later as well.
Equations, Figures, Macros
Finally, the place where LATEX shines. It shines so bright that when Microsoft was looking to make writing equations easier, they implemented many of the basic LATEX commands.
Beyond this, we won't have a ton of time for a one hour workshop, but you can find a more complete reference here.
Document Settings
Very few documents actually look like the default article class in LaTeX. But in the header we can specify some changes to get the pages how we want to look. Also, use a template. Maybe I'll make one available and link it here. For this, the geometry package is a useful tool though.
Concluding Remarks
LATEX rules, Microsoft Word drools.