Introduction to LaTeX

A brief intro to LaTeX and friends. Probably biased. Certainly incomplete. But what do you want? It's a huge ecosystem and it's awesomely disorganized at times! Still, if you're willing to learn, you'll be rewarded with almost limitless typographic beauty.

Contents

• 01-minimal-document.tex is just about the shortest thing that will compile

• 02-basic-article.tex shows something more complete; minimal knowledge for a rough term paper I would guess

• 03-fancier-article.tex uses some packages to make things look nicer, shows off a basic bibliography; what you'd really want for a moderately decent term paper

• 04-lecture-notes.tex and 04-lecture-notes.bib shows off a more complex document (lecture notes for a fictitious course) and messes with lots of things including chapter headings; shows how an index and an external bibliography can be used; also shows off cross-references in the document

• 05-color-test.tex and jhcolors.sty demonstrates how to hack a custom style file

• 26-epigrams.tex is just another example for laying out a document, a famous one in this case

• 50-tikz-rs-latch.tex has a very simple TikZ example for drawing a basic circuit

• 99-basic-presentation.tex shows how to put together a simple presentation using beamer

History

I wrote most of this stuff for a talk I gave to the Johns Hopkins ACM chapter on 2015/02/12. I didn't get through all the material, never touched writing your own .sty files for example. Let's see if I reprise the talk more frequently now, the last time I recall giving a similar talk was in 2007 or so. Yikes!

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for details.