After much delay, I have finally created a LaTeX tutorial. Although there are many introductions to LaTeX, they all suffer from one of two deficiencies: they are either too long or too short. Too-short introductions don’t give potential users enough information, and too-long introductions scare them off. Mine is designed to be an accessible and fast read, but contain enough information to get people making polished LaTeX documents very quickly.
This tutorial is 20 pages long and can easily be read over the course of 10-20 minutes. It covers installation and setup on Windows and Mac OS X, a topic which is often overlooked by beginner’s guides, but can scare off new users since installation is different than standard applications on those systems. It gives a brief introduction to the history and purpose of LaTeX, then provides enough information about
- Sectioning
- Environments
- Text styles
- Packages
- Tables and figures
- Footnotes, cross references and basic bibilographies
- Mathematical notation
that, after reading it, most should be ready to use LaTeX for production, using search engines to look for specific advice not covered in the tutorial.
Download it here (PDF).
Updated September 2008
