Getting Started

TeX Distributions

  1. Overleaf
    • A purely online editor with a comprehensive free version and a premium option
    • All in one option
    • Shared documents like google docs - Requires Internet access
  2. MiKTeX, MacTeX, TeXLive
    • Downloaded versions of the Latex code so you can run it all off your own machine
    • More customization
    • Cannot be shared like google docs - Doesn't require internet access

LaTeX Editors

  1. TeXstudio, TeXmaker, TeXworks
    • Customization
    • Code-oriented
  2. LyX
    • More like a traditional word processor

Useful Packages

LaTeX, like any other code, is reliant on pre-written code to tell the computer exactly what to do. The joy of LaTeX is that the user has a lot more control over what that code is by inclusion of packages (these are analogus of libraries in Python, C, Java, or any other language you may use). There are two camps that people fall into: copy and pasting every library they have ever used between every document, or including each package as they see that they need them. I personally fall into the first camp since it saves me the hassle of updating packages later; but, either way, you want to make sure to keep the list of commonly used packages nearby.

It should also be noted that packages don't just format text, but cover a variety of display  (and even light computational) options. If you want to do something, there is a good chance that a package already does it, so go Google it (or bing, or duckduckgo, whatever you use).

  1. General Formatting
    • geometry, multicol, setspace, ragged2e
    • Change margins, columns, line spacing, alignment, etc.
  2. Math Stuff
    • amsmath, amssymb, amsthm, mathtools, wasysym, esint, physics
    • Any mathematical symbol you can think of
  3. Photos and Graphics
    • graphicx, pdfpages, textpos
    • Add images and PDFs to documents. Textpos allows for absolute positioning of elements (this may not make sense to you know, but once you try to get an image in the right position without it, it will)
  4. Plots, Graphs, and Diagrams
    • tikz, pgfplots, tikz-3dplot
    • Graph functions, plot data, and create diagrams of any kind
  5. Tables
    • array, booktabs, tabularx
    • Format tables any way you want

Final Notes

As per anything with code, google! See the following references for more.

  1. List of LaTeX mathematical symbols
  2.