Documentation and Finding Help

Last updated on 2025-05-05 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • Where can I find help for writing LaTeX documents?
  • How do I find out what commands a package provides?

Objectives

  • Learn how to find help for LaTeX documents

CTAN (The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network)

A large number of LaTeX packages are available on CTAN. CTAN contains packages and related documentation for many widely used LaTeX packages. You can search the archive for specific strings, or browse by category.

CTAN page for the geometry package. Project pages

Individual package pages often contain links to detailed documentation, including PDF manuals and example files. Additional you can find links to the package’s source code, and information about the author(s) and ratings from other users.

Texdoc

Texdoc provides a modern interface for looking up package documentation. Much like CTAN, you can search for packages and view their documentation.

Callout

Texdoc is also available as a command line tool, which queries the same database of information, but allows you to search for packages and documentation from the command line.

Other Resources

As with any language there are many other resources that you can make use of. The Stack Exchange for LaTeX is a great place to ask questions and find answers to common problems.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Find it in the documentation!

We have the geometry package loaded in our document, and we know we want to use to to set the margins of the document, but we want to set them to 2cm on the left and right, and 4cm on the top and bottom. We also want to set the per size to A4. Can you find the documentation for the command and see how to do this?

Section 5.1 describes how to set the page size, and section 5.4 describes how to set the margins.

LATEX 

\documentclass[a4paper, left=2cm, right=2cm, top=4cm, bottom=4cm]{geometry}

or

LATEX 

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[a4paper, left=2cm, right=2cm, top=4cm, bottom=4cm]{geometry}

Challenge 2: Find a specific package.

We have a very particular document we want to create - we are talking about specific positions on a chess board and we want to render these directly in the document. Can you find a package that will help us do this? Can you make a simple chess board using this package?

Searching either CTAN or Texdoc for “chess” will return a number of packages. We’ll use the chessboard package for our example. To make a simple chess board, we can use the chessboard command:

LATEX 

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{chessboard}

\begin{document}

\chessboard[setpieces={Kd1, Qd8}]

\end{document}

Key Points

  • CTAN is a large archive of LaTeX packages and documentation
  • Texdoc is a website & command line tool for searching LaTeX documentation