latex-course/presentation/presentation.md

Introductory Course to \LaTeX

What even is \LaTeX?

• 1978: Donald Knuth gets fed up by typographical errors in his documents and creates TeX
• 1984: Leslie Lamport gets fed up with having to write bonkers TeX-commands and piles on a bunch of macros
• 2025: We're here, still stuck with this ancient crap

But actually, it is a pretty good document preparation system.

(a modern alternative is Typst)

What even is a document preparation system?

It is a system that prepares your documents!

Crucial elements:

• What are the contents of the document?
• Where should all the words and sentences go?
• What do we do about equations, figures and tables?
• We need references and appendices and other things, right?!?

First Principle of \LaTeX

Separate content and presentation.

• General classes/types of content
• Styling applies to the entire document
• Just write, and deal with making it pretty later
• The publisher will mangle your document anyways

Second Principle of \LaTeX

Let the system handle book keeping.

• Don't manually update captions and figure numbers
• Don't manually update captions and table numbers
• Don't manually write/update/sort your list of references

Now, how do we use it?

Types of content

• Frontmatter
• Sections, subsections, paragraphs
• Math: both inline and standalone
• Figures and tables
• References (bibiolgraphy)
• Appendices

Document structure

• Preamble
• Frontmatter - title, table of content, list of figures/tables
• (The acutal) Document
  • Sections/Chapters
    • Text
    • Math
    • Figures
    • Tables
• Bibliography
• Appenices