Introduction to LaTeX

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. (Source: latex-project.org)

The introduction of LaTeX presentation covered the basic syntax for document preparation for formats suitable for technical documents, reports and presentations. I started by using a plain text file, gradually filling up with a bunch of LaTeX code which can be easily managed with a version control system.

The LaTeX code that will be used during the presentation will be made available.

Transcript

1. Developers Conference 2018 Introduction to L A TEX Ish Sookun Linux System Administrator La Sentinelle Ltd LSL Digital (we develop & host digital products for La Sentinelle Ltd & subsidiaries)
2. Outline What is L A TEX? How is it pronounced? A brief history of L A TEX Where is it used? Getting L A TEX Installation Configuring Visual Studio Code Structure of L A TEX documents documentclass, options, sections etc Demo Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 1 of 14 :)
3. What is L A TEX?
4. How is it pronounced? There is no specific recommendation on pronouncing L A TEX but the TEX part is pronounced tech as explained by its creator Prof. Donald E. Knuth. TEX in Greek means art, craft or technique. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 2 of 14 :)
5. A brief history of L A TEX The L A TEX program is a computer typesetting for placing text on a page. It was written by Dr. Leslie Lamport while using TEX’s typesetting engine & macro system developed by Prof. Donald E. Knuth. 1962 - TEX created by Prof. Donald E. Knuth 1968 - TEX and Metafont 1982 - TEX82 1983 - L A TEX2.09 created by Dr. Leslie Lamport 1994 - L A TEX2ε L A TEX3 is under development since 2014. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 3 of 14 :)
6. Where is it used? Over the years L A TEX has become the standard document system for writing technical and scientific papers. It’s widely used by the scientific community to produce documents that contains formulas, for example the Schrodinger equation: eiˆ k.ˆ r = ∞ l=0 (2l + 1) il jl (kr) Pl (cos θ) L A TEX is also used by scholars to write documents that contain non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Greek, Sanskrit, Tamil, etc. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 4 of 14 :)
7. Getting L A TEX
8. Installation I use Texmaker on openSUSE Tumbleweed and installation is straighforward via the command-line console: sudo zypper in texmaker Installation packages are available for Linux distributions, Windows and macOS from the project website xm1math.net/texmaker. Texmaker is a cross-platform open source L A TEX editor with an integrated PDF viewer. It’s written in C++ and uses the Qt interface. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 5 of 14 :)
9. Configuring Visual Studio Code A L A TEX extension by James Yu is available through the Visual Studio Marketplace. Press Ctrl + P, paste the following command and press enter. ext install James-Yu.latex-workshop The default config will use the pdflatex engine but it can be easily configured to use xelatex, lualatex or some other engine. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 6 of 14 :)
10. Structure of L A TEX documents
11. Example code % Simple LaTeX document \documentclass[11pt]{article} \title{A Simple {\LaTeX} Document} \author{Ish Sookun\\ La Sentinelle Ltd} \date{\today} \begin{document} \begin{abstract} This is an abstract. \end{abstract} Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 7 of 14 :)
12. \documentclass Define the document type using the documentclass command. Possible classes are: • article • report • book • beamer The documentclass calls a document template that determines document characteristics such as headers, margins, and so on. Example usage: \documentclass[11pt]{article} Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 8 of 14 :)
13. \begin{document} Everything that makes up your document should reside within the document environment. \begin{document} ... \end{document} Within the document block you can now add an abstract and sections containing paragraphs. \section{Introduction} All our digital products are deployed on Amazon Web Services.\\ Expenses incurred by running instances... Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 9 of 14 :)
14. \maketitle To display a title you need to declare the following components in the preamble: • title • author • date You can accomplish the whole with the following commands: \title{Cloud Expenses Report} \author{Ish Sookun} \date{\today} ... \maketitle These commands should be in the preamble, except the maketitle command which comes after the \begin{document}. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 10 of 14 :)
15. \begin{abstract} A block of text can be formatted by declaring an environment called abstract. Environments are delimited by an opening \begin and a closing \end tag in the form: \begin{abstract} This report was prepared after analyzing the expenses incurred over a period of twelve months starting January 2017. \end{abstract} An abstract is optional and I would recommend it only if you are writing a report that is several pages long. Otherwise, you may also have a section that is called abstract in your report. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 11 of 14 :)
16. Woohoo! It’s demo time :)
17. openSUSE Leap 15 - release is coming! 25 May 2018 :) Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 13 of 14 :)
18. Further Reading The TEXbook by Donald E. Knuth L A TEX - A Document Preparation System by Dr. Leslie Lamport by Dr. Leslie Lamport I used the Metropolis beamer theme by Matthias Vogelgesang for this presentation. Its source can be obtained at github.com/matze/mtheme. Developers Conference 2018 — Introduction to L ATEX — Ish Sookun — Voil` a Hotel 19 May 2018 We’re on slide 14 of 14 :)