LaTeX
It's pronounced "LAH-tech" or "LAY-tech", not "LAY-tecks"; the letters in TeX are meant to represent the Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi.
Last updated
It's pronounced "LAH-tech" or "LAY-tech", not "LAY-tecks"; the letters in TeX are meant to represent the Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi.
Last updated
is a typesetting system, much like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. It is not a text editor. is used widely in the scientific and technical publishing industry; if you've seen a document that looks like the picture below, chances are it was written in .
While documents come in all sorts of flavors, they generally share a similar appearance because they use the Computer Modern typeface. However, all the fonts, colors, layouts and pretty much everything is customizable--is a way of "programming documents".
While Microsoft Word is a "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) system, is decidedly not. Instead, is written as code (see below), and then compiled, usually into a PDF.
The most common reason to use is because you are writing a document with equations in it. There is simply no other way to get beautifully formatted equations (although many programs like Word now support syntax).
Even if you don't have equations, allows writers to stop worrying about annoying formatting issues, breaking their document when they add a picture, etc. and focus on the actual content. Documents like reports and books can be written in sections and seamlessly re-compiled using the articleandbookclasses, while the formatting and numbering of tables, figures, references, citations, footnotes, etc. are taken care of completely automatically.
To give one example, if you have 5 figures labeled Fig. 1 through Fig. 5, you can insert a figure between Fig. 1 and Fig 2. and not have to worry about changing the references to Figs. 2-5 to Figs. 3-6. This can save an enormous amount of time when writing longer documents.
There are two ways to use : locally on your computer or in the *cloud*.
This is really for hardcore users and people without internet. You'll first need to install a version of compatible with your operating system. Head over to https://www.latex-project.org/get/ to get started; we recommed TeX Live for Linux, MacTeX for macOS, and MiKTeX for Windows. These downloads can be pretty big!
As mentioned previously, is a typesetting system, not an editor. You can write documents in Atom, Sublime, Notepad, Notepad++, vim, Emacs, ex, TextEdit, or whatever text editor you can get your hands on. That being said, TeXnicCenter and TeXstudio are popular editors for Windows, and MacTeX includes TeXShop; you might want to use these or similar TeX-oriented editors to edit your documents unless you know what you're doing. Linux users can choose from 10s of options; for some reason people who are into Linux are also into TeX.
Welcome to the future. Simply head over to https://www.overleaf.com/ (now merged with ShareLaTeX) to get started! UC Berkeley provides free Overleaf Professional with a verified berkeley.edu email address. Overleaf has hundreds of great templates and tutorials to help you get started.
While there are hundreds of tutorials on the internet, this one is pretty good: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Learn_LaTeX_in_30_minutes. When in doubt, just Google! Chances are someone's had the same question and made a StackOverflow post about it.
We have previously used to compile our reports for NASA Student Launch. If you ever need to make a checklist, design document, or report, feel free to use . Generally, Google Docs is a little easier for the uninitiated, but don't be afraid to make your documents look nice!
