How to LaTeX

Install LaTeX

You will need LaTeX-distribution and an editor.

LaTeX-distributions

For the former, the most popular is

  • TeX Live (Linux, Windows) by the TeX User Group
  • MacTeX (Mac OS) by the TeX User Group
  • MiKTeX (Windows only)

LaTeX-editors

In theory, any text editor will do the job. In practice, you probably want syntax highlighting and some IDE-functionality. Here are our top recommendations:

There are plenty of alternatives:

  • Lyx (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows); CONTRA: do you really need your own file format .lyx?!
  • Texmaker (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows); CONTRA: seems to be superseded by TeXStudio

Testing the installation

a minimal latex document contains :

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
Hello world!
\end{document}

Save the 5 lines above as minimal.tex, open it with the editor and compile.

Introduction to LaTeX

There’s the classic The not so short introduction to LaTeX by Tobias Oetker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna and Elisabeth Schlegl. It’s well worth (re-)reading and even ships with most LaTeX distributions. Just try

’’’ $ texdoc lshort ‘’’

More specifically, for typesetting mathematics, there’s the Short Math Guide for LaTeX by Michael Downes, updated by Barbara Beeton. You also find your local version with

’’’ $ texdoc short-math-guide ‘’’

Write LaTeX

Armin Gerl has provided a template for the (German) master thesis (based on the standard report-class):

Alternatively, Florian Stegmaier built template (based on the KomaScript scrreprt-class):

Document Classes

The standard classes are book, report, article with differences in the (default) settings and the available commands/environments. Here’s a preview of some documentclass options.

For presentations, there’s the beamer-class. For a CV and a (business) letter, my choices are moderncv and dinbrief, respectively.

There are plenty of alternatives:

  • There are the popular replacements scrbook, scrreprt, scrartcl from the KOMA-Script bundle. Here’s a list of incompatibilities.
  • There’s the famous classicthesis template by Andre Miede, in particular for PhD thesis.
  • Many departments, work groups, conferences, and journals offer their own documentclasses.

Maintain your bibliography with BibTeX

A text editor is sufficient to maintain one’s .bib-file, but if you prefer some GUI (which might for example also link to the corresponding pdf’s), there’s JabRef.

see tex-stackexchange for a list of sources for bibtex-entries, e.g.

Draw beautiful inline graphics with TikZ

see tex-stackexchange for a list of libraries

Help

General

Specific

  • Detexify by Philipp Kühl and Daniel Kirsch to reverse-lookup the LaTeX-command for that math-symbol for which you don’t know the name
  • Beamer Theme Matrix to visualize combinations of themes (rows) and color themes (columns)
  • Advice on Data Presentation/Visualization with LaTeX by Stephan Lukasczyk

Alternative

Wer auf die lokale Installation verzichten möchte, kann auch einen Online-Service wie Overleaf nutzen. Das ist besonders dann charmant, wenn man/frau sich nicht mit den Details der Installation und Paketauswahl kümmern möchte und/oder mit anderen gemeinsam an einem Dokument arbeiten möchte.

TODO

LaTeX-Vorlagen f"ur

  • Projektarbeiten (Studienprojekt Mathematik im Studiengang Ingenieurpädagogik)
  • Begleithefte zum Landshuter Lernlabor (LLL)
  • Bachelor-Arbeiten (Mathematik an der Hochschule Landshut)

History

An earlier version of this document was published in the blog of PGBBS.


Archive