Beautiful Technical Documents Easily Made with \(\LaTeX\) + Overleaf

ResBaz Arizona Conference: Tuesday, May 26th, 2020 10:00-12:00

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This workshop is intended to provide a basic intro-duction to LaTeX. Our hope is that this tutorial empowers you on the path to using typesetting languages to write your awesome papers and theses! Like any language, syntax is important, and we’ll touch on the most common issues that users face. We hope to cover: why you want to use LaTeX, the basics (the LaTeX preamble, organization with sections, commented text, math, greek, equations, lists, fonts), figures and tables, places to find LaTeX help, and if we have time, using git and GitHub with version control

The syllabus (along with examples) is available here on Overleaf.

We will be live coding through Overleaf, so you will have a completed project that will look similar to this one: ResBaz 2020 \(\LaTeX\) Live Demo Final Version.

Getting Started

  1. Obtain an Overleaf account by going to overleaf.com and signing up for a FREE account. We will use Overleaf to easily edit LaTeX documents without requiring installing a LaTeX package on your computer.
  2. If you would like, installing git is beneficial for part of the course where I will demo using version control with git, Overleaf, and GitHub. If you do not have a GitHub account, you'll also want to sign-up for a FREE one here.

Introductions

Name, Affiliation, Title, Email, Social Media

Questions and Answers

In this section, you can post your questions and feel free to answer if you have it. Questions will be answered during or after the workshop.

  1. Q. Kelsey: is there any benefit to using it on your own machine?
(y)
    A. Chun: Regarding using Overleaf vs your own LaTeX installation, this is a personal preference. Personally both Peter and I have our own installation. I use Overleaf to always have a back-up copy of my document somewhere else that is safe
    A. Fernando: You can use your own editor/IDE as well

  2. Q: Chinmay: How to write comments
    A. Peter: % comment

  3. Q: Angela Hughes: Where did you double click, again, to navigate to that code block?
    A. Chun: On the PDF viewing panel, double click on any text and that will automatically bring up the code on the right side

Installing TeX on your computer

There are a number of ways to install \(\LaTeX\) on your computer. This is not an exhaustive list, but illustrates some ways to have it installed:

Mac:

To install texlive:

macports: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/TeXLivePackages

$ (sudo) port install texlive

Homebrew:

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula-linux/texlive

MacTeX: https://www.tug.org/mactex/ (but keep in mind this has other applications and tools)

Linux:

Ubuntu:

$ (sudo) apt-get install texlive

CentOS:

$ (sudo) yum install texlive

Windows:

TUG guide for Window installation: https://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html

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