Hello, and welcome to getting started
with LaTeX. This tutorial will walk you
through creating your first document
using the LaTeX
system. Alright, so what is LaTeX? LaTeX
is a typesetting system commonly used
for technical and scientific
documents. It's widely used throughout
the world of academia specifically in
engineering and science fields. This is
due to how easy LaTeX makes it for someone
to include complex mathematical
equations, models and more. Most documents
written in math or physics courses here
at Bucknell are written using
LaTeX. Throughout this tutorial we'll be
utilizing a free LaTeX editor called
Overleaf which is available online at
overleaf.com. All right, so let's set up
an editor. We'll start by going to
Overleaf and signing in. If you don't
have an account, register using your
school provided Google
account. Once you see this page, click the
create a new project button and select
blank project. You'll be sent to the
Overleaf editor. This is where we'll be
working on our documents. The editor has
three main segments: the file selector,
code editor, and preview pane. When
editing code, you'll need to hit the
recompile button to see changes on the
preview
pane. Let's talk about some commonly used
tags. We begin with the title, author, and
date tags. These specify important
information about the document and their
specifics are
self-explanatory. Next we have the begin
tag which tells the compiler to start
building the document
itself. The make title tag tells the
compiler to format and display the title
information including the author and the
date. The section tag signifies the
beginning of a section and produces a
numbered section heading.
Next we'll talk about tags that can be
used to format text. The textbf tag
makes text appear bold. The textit tag
makes text appear
italicized. The underline tag makes text
appear underlined. The emph tag emphasizes a
specific block of text. The appearance of
this effect depends on the situation. If
the text being emphasized is within a
block of standard text, it will be
italicized. Otherwise, if that selected
text block is within other italicized
text, it will be
de-italicized. These effects can be
combined within the same line. For
example, this line of code will italicize
the selected text as well as keep the
surrounding text
bold. Next we'll talk about displaying
math within a LaTeX document. Math
equations can be displayed in two modes:
inline mode and display mode.
Starting with inline mode, we use the
begin math and end math tags to specify
where an equation is written. This method
places an equation inline, meaning that
it will wrap as if it was part of the
paragraph, blending with the surrounding
text. On the other hand, we can use
display mode which uses the begin
equation and end equation tags to
distinguish equations from text.
This will display math as if it's its
own line in a paragraph and can be used
to separate equations from the rest of
the
text. Now we'll put it all together.
Here's an example of a document, this one
being the script for this video. Notice
how the title, author, and date tags are
used as well as the section headers. The
title, author, and date are formatted in
the center of the page
automatically with text sizes being
decided by the compiler. The section
headings are automatically numbered and
bolded and create coherent paragraphs
with minimal effort. As you can see, the
LaTeX system allows for an author to
create a document without focusing on
its formatting as one would see with
other what-you-see-is-what-you-get
editors such as Microsoft Word or Google
Docs. Instead, the author can focus on the
content knowing that the content will be
presented in a coherent way that makes
sense to the reader. When you're done
writing the document or making any edits
to it, you can click the recompile button
and that will display a preview in the
preview pane. When you want to download
or export the document, click the
download button next to the recompile
button. That will export a PDF file and
send it to your downloads
folder. And that's it! Congratulations,
you've just finished your first LaTeX
document. I hope you've been able to
learn from this video and you'll be able
to recreate a LaTeX document whenever
you need. Thank you for watching.