latex-course/presentation/presentation.md

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# 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