LaTeX Examples

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

Installing LaTeX

On Windows:

• Download and install MikTeX
• Download and install TeXMaker

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.

• A (nearly) minimal latex document (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Not the simplest possible tex document, but pretty close.

• Styling text (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Bold, italics, underlined text, quotation marks, as well as diacritics.

• The parts of a tex file (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  A bit about what “documentclass” and “begin document” mean.

• Writing mathematics (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Typing equations.

• Lists (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  For when you have a bunch of things and want to write them.

• Graphics (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf) (image)

  Including pictures in your documents. To compile this example, you will need to put the image file dice.png inside a folder called gfx next to your tex file.

• Packages (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Going beyond plain LaTeX.

• Document Structure (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Breaking up a large document into subparts.

• Files (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  The files that make up a LaTeX project.

• Counters, Labels, and Cross References (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Linking from one part of a document to another.

• Bibliographies (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf) (bib windows) (bib unix)

  Citing other works. For this example you will also need the bib file.

• Slideshows (tex windows) (tex unix) (pdf)

  Slick presentations with the beamer class.