# LaTeX Examples

Posted on 2017-05-14 by nbloomf
Tags: latex

This post contains some links and examples I threw together to help students getting started with LaTeX.

LaTeX is a markup language for academic and technical writing. It is the defacto standard way to produce publication-ready documents in mathematics, including books and journal articles. The goal of this tutorial is to help you learn to use LaTeX to produce documents.

## Why should I learn LaTeX?

The only real answer to this question is “because you want to”. You can certainly have a happy life without knowing anything at all about LaTeX, and it does have a steep learning curve.

BUT.

If you find yourself frequently writing complex equations, or writing documents with complicated cross-referencing or bibliographies, or wanting to publish a technical book or paper, or wanting to communicate math over the web, then LaTeX can make your life better in several concrete ways.

## What is LaTeX?

• It is a markup language for technical writing.
• It is not a single monolithic program. It is an ecosystem of tools that work together.
• It gives the author control. There are IDEs which behave like word processors, hiding away some of the details. Experienced users can also dig into the guts for more power.
• It does not have a single designer. Many people have worked together over many years to build and maintain the LaTeX ecosystem we have today.
• It is not a commercial product. You do not have to buy a license or get permission to use it.
• It is industrial strength. TeX, the software at the heart of the ecosystem, was explicitly designed for producing “camera-ready” books, and there are commercial publishing houses which use it.
• It is designed for technical and academic text. Complex equations and diagrams, cross references, bibliographies, numbering

On Windows:

## Resources

• LaTeX Wikibook: Really great place to find quick answers.
• TeX StackExchange: I wouldn’t start searching here, but if you Google search for latex blah where blah is some problem you have, typically links here have good info.

## Examples

This is a list of example LaTeX documents which demonstrate how to do some specific things.