An Introduction to Using LaTeX for Academic Publishing: All in One View

Content from Introduction to LaTeX and Overleaf

Last updated on 2025-06-24 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can I write and render a LaTeX document?
How can I use Overleaf to write and render a LaTeX document?

Objectives

Demonstrate how to create a new project in Overleaf.
Become familiar with the Overleaf interface.

What is LaTeX

LaTeX is a typesetting language, useful for combining text with mathematical equations, figures, tables, and citations, among other things.

Unlike common word processors like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer, LaTex is a markup language, meaning that formatting (including bold text, bullet points, and changes in font size) is indicated by the use of commands, special characters, or environments.

In order to produce the actual document, this mark-up text must be compiled. Errors in the mark-up can either be non-fatal, meaning the document will compile with some warnings; or fatal, meaning the document will fail to compile.

Our first Overleaf Project

There are several ways to write LaTeX documents, but we’ll be using Overleaf, a cloud-based LaTeX editor. This has the advantage of being accessible from any computer with an internet connection, without the need to install any additional software. As part of the preparation for this workshop, you should have registered for an account on Overleaf.

We’ll start by creating a new, ‘Blank’, project in Overleaf by clicking on the large green button that says ‘New Project’ in the top left corner of the screen. This will open a drop-down menu with a number of options. We’ll select ‘Blank Project’ from this menu. Name the project ‘LaTeX Workshop’ and click ‘Create’.

The Overleaf Interface

Once the project is created, you’ll see that it isn’t quite blank. There are four main panels when you open a new project in Overleaf:

1. The File Navigator on the top left, which shows all of the files in your project.
1. The File Outline on the bottom left, which shows the structure of the current file.
1. The Text Editor in the middle, where you can write your LaTeX code.
1. The Preview Pane on the right, which shows a preview of the compiled document.

You’ll notice that our project isn’t quite blank, as we have a file called main.tex open in the text editor with some LaTeX code already written. This is a basic LaTeX document, with some of the minimum requirements for a LaTeX document.

The Main Menu

When we want to switch projects or create a new one, we can use the main menu at the top of the screen, which is indicated by a small “house” icon. Clicking on this icon will take us back to the main landing page for overleaf, where we initially created our project.

We can see now in the section “All Projects” that our new project, “LaTeX Workshop”, is listed there, that we are the owner, and that it was just recently modified. We can click on the project name to open it again.

Instructor Note

Inline instructor notes can help inform instructors of timing challenges associated with the lessons. They appear in the “Instructor View”

Challenge 1: Create a new project, then delete it

See if you can create a new project in Overleaf. Name it “A test project”. Then close the project and reopen the “LaTeX Workshop” project. Finally, delete the “A test project” project.

Answer

Creating a new project:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
Click the “New Project” button.
Select “Blank Project” from the drop-down menu.
Enter in “A test project” as the project name.
Click “Create”.

Closing and reopening the “LaTeX Workshop” project:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
Click on the “LaTeX Workshop” project to reopen it.

Deleting the “A test project” project:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
Click the “trash can” icon next to the “A test project” project.
Confirm that you want to delete the project.

Challenge 2: Copy your current project, then delete it

See if you can create a copy of your current project “LaTeX Workshop” in Overleaf. Name it “A copy project”. Then close the project and reopen the “LaTeX Workshop” project. Finally, delete the “A test project” project.

Answer

Creating a copy project:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
For the “LaTeX Workshop” project, navigate to the right column “Actions”.
Click on the first button, the “copy” button, in the “Actions” column for the “LaTeX Workshop” project.
Enter in “A copy project” as the project name.
Click “Copy”.

Closing and reopening the “LaTeX Workshop” project:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
Click on the “LaTeX Workshop” project to reopen it.

Deleting the “A copy project” project:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
Click the “trash can” icon next to the “A copy project” project.
Confirm that you want to delete the project.

Challenge 3: Three ways to download your project as pdf

See if you can download your new project “LaTeX Workshop” in Overleaf as a pdf file. In your current project “LaTeX Workshop”, navigate to the Preview Pane on the right. At the panel bar for the Preview Pane, find the button to download a pdf. If you have figured out the described way for downloading the pdf, try to find two alternative options on how to save your project as a pdf.

Answer

Option A as described in the task:

In “LaTeX Workshop”, navigate to the Preview Pane on the right.
At the panel bar for the Preview Pane, there is a button with an arrow pointing downwards.
If you hover over this button, it displays “Download PDF”.
Click on that button and a pdf of your current project “LaTeX Workshop” will be downloaded.

Option B:

In “LaTeX Workshop”, click on the top left icon which contains the Overleaf symbol with the word “Menu”.
The Menu sidebar will open on the left.
In the first paragraph “Downloads”, click on the “pdf” button on the right to download your current project “LaTeX Workshop”.

Option C:

Click the “house” icon on the top menu bar to return to the main Overleaf page.
In “All projects”, you can find your project “LaTeX Workshop”.
Navigate to the column “Actions” on the right side.
If you hover over the third button, it says “Download PDF”.
Click on this button to download your current project “LaTeX Workshop”.

Key Points

We can use Overleaf to edit and render LaTeX documents.
An Overleaf project can contain many files.

Content from File Structure

Last updated on 2025-06-24 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

What is the basic structure of a LaTeX document?
How do I see what my LaTeX document looks like when it’s rendered?

Objectives

Become familiar with the basic structure of a LaTeX document.
Use Overleaf to render a LaTeX document into a PDF.
Identify how to add special characters to a LaTeX document.

Editing the Document

We can edit the main.tex file by clicking on it in the File Navigator. This will open the file in the text editor. Let’s edit some of the provided code to create our first LaTeX document.

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.
\end{document}

Callout

Errors happen! Check that you have entered each line in the text file exactly as written above. Sometimes seemingly small input changes give large changes in the result, including causing a document to not work. If you are stuck, try erasing the document and copying it fresh from the lines above.

Looking at our document

Our first document shows us the basics. LaTeX documents are a mixture of text and commands.

Commands start with a backslash \ and sometimes have arguments in curly braces {}.
Text is what you want to appear in the document and requires no special formatting.

Let’s look at the commands we’ve used so far:

\documentclass{article}: This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating. (We might also use this command to instruct LaTeX to use a specific font size, paper size, or other document settings - more on this later!)
\begin{document} and \end{document}: These commands mark the beginning and end of the document body. These commands are required in every LaTeX document and create the document body.

Callout

You can have multiple \begin{...} and \end{...} pairs in a single LaTeX document, but you must have exactly as many \begin{...} commands as \end{...} commands.

Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble. The preamble is where you set up the document, including the document class, title, author, and any other settings you want to apply to the entire document.

Comments

We can add comments to our document by using the % character. Anything after the % on a line is ignored by LaTeX. As in any other programming language, comments are useful for explaining what the code is doing. We’ll start incorporating comments into our document going forward to explain some of the specifics of the LaTeX code we’re writing.

As we go, you should use your version of the document to add your own comments as a way of taking notes on what you’re learning, and to act as a reference for yourself in the future!

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}


% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.
\end{document}

Going forward, the examples we provide will not always include comments, but you should add them to your document as you see fit.

Rendering the Document

In your Overleaf project, click the green Recompile button to render the document. This will generate a preview of the document in the right-hand pane.

Callout

There are many shortcut keyboard commands that you can use to speed up your work in Overleaf. When we want to render the document, we can use Ctrl + S or Ctrl + Enter (Windows) or Cmd + S or Cmd + Enter (Mac). This will save the document and render it in one step.

Paragraphs

Note that we have an empty line between our two lines of text. This is important in LaTeX, as this indicates a new paragraph. Let’s try removing the empty line and recompiling the document to see what happens.

You should see that the two lines of text are now displayed on the same line. This is because LaTeX treats the two lines as part of the same paragraph. If you want to start a new paragraph, you need to leave a blank line between the two paragraphs. Instead of using an empty line, there is also the command \par that leads you to the same result of creating a new paragraph. More on this in one of the challenges below.

Special Characters

You’ve probably noticed by now that the characters \, {, and } are special characters in LaTeX. There are others though, such as $, %, &, # and ^. These characters tend to be much less common in text, but you can use them by “escaping” them with a backslash. For example,

\% produces %
\& produces &
\# produces #
\^ produces ^

and so on.

Show details

What about the \ character?

The \ character is used to escape other characters in latex, so it’s not possible to escape it in the same way. Instead, you can use \textbackslash to produce a backslash in your document.

Callout

Sometimes, special characters can, unintentionally, conflate with characters that are used after that special character. You can prevent that by typing {} directly behind your special character. The following LaTeX code gives you an example:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

Here, the letter a is conflated with \^{} by typing \^ a.

To prevent that, type \^{} a.

\end{document}

Errors, Warnings and the Log

Inevitably, everyone makes mistakes when writing LaTeX documents. When you recompile your document, you might not see any changes in the preview pane. This could be because there is an error in your document. If there is an error, you will see a red number next to the “Recompile” button over the “Logs and output files” button. You will also see certain lines highlighted in red in the text editor, along with a suggestion of what the error might be.

Let’s introduce an error into our project to see what this might look like. Let’s introduce a typo into the documentclass command by changing it to documnetclass. When we recompile the document, we can see our errors:

And if we click on the “Logs and output files” button, we can see a more detailed error message:

We can see similar messages when hovering over the small red circle next to the error in the text editor:

We’ll look more into how we can read and fix errors in a later episode.

Fixing Errors

Our tiny typo seems to have caused quite a number of issues! This can happen, the important thing is to read the error message and try to understand what it’s telling you. In this case it says:

Undefined control sequence. ./main.tex, 2

The compiler is having trouble understanding a command you have used. Check that the command is
spelled correctly. If the command is part of a package, make sure you have included the package
in your preamble using \usepackage{...}.

In order to diagnose the issue, we can first look at the name of the message. In this case, it’s Undefined control sequence. This means that LaTeX doesn’t recognize the command we’ve used. Specifically, it says, this undefined sequence is on line 2 of the main.tex file. We can then look at the line and see that we’ve made a typo in the \documentclass command.

As soon as we fix this typo and recompile our document, we should see the preview pane update and all of the remaining errors disappear.

Callout

The subsequent errors, talking about “missing begin document”, and “font size command not defined” are all cascading errors from the initial error. When LaTeX encounters an error, it can’t continue to compile the document, so it stops and reports the error it found. This can sometimes lead to multiple error messages, but generally it’s important to fix the first error first, as this will often resolve subsequent errors.

Challenges

Challenge 1: What’s wrong with this document?

There is an error in the following LaTeX document. Can you find it?

(Feel to make a new project in Overleaf to test this out!)

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\title{My First LaTeX Document}

I've created a new LaTeX document.

But there's an issue with it that's preventing it from rendering correctly.

Can you find and fix the error?

\end{document}

Answer

Each section of a LaTeX document must be enclosed in a pair of \begin{...} and \end{...}. This document is missing the \begin{document} command.

Challenge 2: Displaying Special characters.

How would I display the following text in a LaTeX document?

5 is greater than 3 & 2 is less than 4. This is 100% true.

Answer

We need to use escapes before each of the special characters. The following LaTeX code will display the text correctly:

LATEX

5 is greater than 3 \& 2 is less than 4. This is 100\% true.

Challenge 3: Paragraphs with `\par`.

In the section about Paragraphs from above we learned that empty lines are important to create paragraphs. However, there is also a LaTeX command called \par which might be of help for us. Consider the LaTeX code below. Can you already guess which of these options prints Hello World! and This is my first LaTeX document. in two separate lines? (Feel to make a new project in Overleaf to test this out!)

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}

% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here
% Option A
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.

% Option B
Hello World! This is my first LaTeX document.

% Option C
Hello World! \par This is my first LaTeX document.

% Option D
Hello World! \par

This is my first LaTeX document.
\end{document}

Answer

The command \par initiates a new paragraph for us even if we write text in just one line (see Option C). Solely, Option B out of all four options does not create the intended new paragraph as neither an empty line nor \par is used. Moreover, Option D gives us the same result as Option A and Option C, although we used both, \par and an empty line.

Challenge 4: One line of code with paragraphs and special characters.

How would I display the following text in a LaTeX document but using just one line of code?

Hello World! This is my first LaTeX document.
Now, I know how to initiate paragraphs without an empty line.
Even more, I can write # and ^ correctly using LaTeX.

Answer

We need to use \par to initiate a new paragraph without using a new line of code. Moreover, we need to use escapes before each of the special characters. The following LaTeX code will display the text correctly:

LATEX

Hello World! This is my first LaTeX document. \par Now, I know how to initiate paragraphs without an empty line. \par Even more, I can write \# and \^{} correctly using LaTeX.

Key Points

We can use Overleaf to edit and render LaTeX documents.
The % character is used to add comments to a LaTeX document.
LaTeX documents are a mixture of text and commands.
Commands start with a backslash \ and sometimes have arguments in curly braces {}.
We can view errors by either clicking on the “Logs and output files” or hovering over the red circle in the text editor.

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like:

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}


% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.
\end{document}

Content from The Structure of a Document

Last updated on 2025-04-30 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How are LaTeX documents structured?

Objectives

Identify the different kinds of section commands in LaTeX.
Create a list within a LaTeX document.

Sections

In a word processor, you might use headings to organize your document.In LaTeX, we’ll use the section commands:

\section{...}
\subsection{...}

LaTeX will handle all of the numbering, formatting, vertical spacing, fonts, and so on in order to keep these elements consistent throughout your document. Let’s add sections to our document.

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}


% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.

% The section command automatically numbers and formats the section heading.
\section{Sections}

I can add content to my first section!

% The subsection command does the same thing, but for sections within sections.
\subsection{Subsection}

I can put a subsection inside my first section.

\section{Second Section}

And this text will go into another section.

\end{document}

You should have something that looks like this:

Callout

There are many different section commands in LaTeX, including \subsubsection{...}, \paragraph{...}, \chapter{...}, and more. Each of these commands will create a new section heading with a different level of indentation and numbering.

Some of these commands are only available in certain document classes, so be sure to check the documentation for the class you are using.

Lists

In LaTeX, as in markdown, there are two types of lists: ordered and unordered. They are both defined with \begin{...} and \end{...} commands, as we saw with the document body. Let’s add an ordered list to our document.

We’ll replace our “Second Section” with one for “Lists” and add an ordered list:

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}


% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.

% The section command automatically numbers and formats the section heading.
\section{Sections}

I can add content to my first section!

% The subsection command does the same thing, but for sections within sections.
\subsection{Subsection}

I can put a subsection inside my first section.

\section{Lists}

There are two types of lists: ordered and unordered.

\subsection{Ordered}

Ordered lists have a number or letter associated with each item.

\begin{enumerate}
  \item Item 1
  \item Item 2
  \item Item 3
\end{enumerate}

\end{document}

When you compile this document, you should see something like this in the preview pane:

Callout

Note that the \item commands do not need to be enclosed in braces. These commands do not take any arguments, so they can be used as standalone commands. The text that follows the \item command will be treated as the content of the list item. However, you are able to specify your own bullet point symbols with \item[] manually. For instance, if you want a list with small letters in brackets you can use the following LaTeX code:

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}


% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here

% List with custom bullet point symbols
\begin{itemize}
  \item[(a)] Item 1
  \item[(b)] Item 2
  \item[(c)] Item 3
\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Adding an unordered list is just as easy. We can use the exact same syntax, but replace the enumerate environment with itemize.

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}


% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here
Hello World!

This is my first LaTeX document.

% The section command automatically numbers and formats the section heading.
\section{Sections}

I can add content to my first section!

% The subsection command does the same thing, but for sections within sections.
\subsection{Subsection}

I can put a subsection inside my first section.

\section{Lists}

There are two types of lists: ordered and unordered.

\subsection{Ordered}

Ordered lists do not have numbers or letters associated with each item.

\begin{enumerate}
  \item Item 1
  \item Item 2
  \item Item 3
\end{enumerate}

\subsection{Unordered}

Unordered lists are just a series of items preceded by a marker.

\begin{itemize}
  \item Item 1
  \item Item 2
  \item Item 3
\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Challenges

Challenge 1: What needs to change?

We have the following in our LaTeX document:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{enumerate}
  \item Banana Bread
  \item Carrot Muffins
  \item Apple Cake
\end{enumerate}

\end{document}

How would we modify this to change this ordered list to an unordered list?

Answer

You would need to change the enumerate environment to itemize:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{itemize}
  \item Banana Bread
  \item Carrot Muffins
  \item Apple Cake
\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Challenge 2: Can you do it?

We would like to have the following appear in our LaTeX document:

Apples
1. Gala
2. Fuji
3. Granny Smith
Bananas
Oranges

How would you write this in LaTeX?

Answer

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{itemize}
  \item Apples
  \begin{enumerate}
    \item Gala
    \item Fuji
    \item Granny Smith
  \end{enumerate}
  \item Bananas
  \item Oranges
\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Challenge 3: Enumerate your list manually

We would like to have the following appear in our LaTeX document:

Gala
Fuji
Granny Smith

How would you write this in LaTeX without using enumerate but itemize with \item[]?

Answer

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{itemize}
  \item[1.] Gala
  \item[2.] Fuji
  \item[3.] Granny Smith
\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Key Points

LaTeX documents are structured using section commands.
There are many different section commands in LaTeX, including \subsubsection{...}, \paragraph{...}, \chapter{...}, and more.
Lists in LaTeX are created using the enumerate and itemize environments.

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Using Document Classes

Last updated on 2025-06-24 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

What is a LaTeX Document class?
How does a document class affect the layout of a LaTeX document?

Objectives

Identify the various types of document classes available in LaTeX
Create a document using an alternative document class

What is a Document Class?

A document class sets up the general layout of the document, including (but not limited to):

design (margins, fonts, spacing, etc)
availability of chapters
title page layout

Document classes can also add new commands and environments to the document.

Callout

Document classes can also set global options that apply to the document as a whole.

These options are set in square brackets after the document class name, for example:

LATEX

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

The Base Document Classes

LaTeX comes with a set of standard document classes:

article: a short document without chapters
report: a longer document with chapters, intended for single sided printing
book: a longer document with chapters, intended for double sided printing, as well as other features like front and back matter
letter: a short document with no sections
slides: a document for creating slide presentations

We’re going to leave our main.tex file for a minute and play around with some of these document classes.

Writing a Letter

So far we’ve been using the article document class. Let’s try using the letter document class to write a letter.

Callout

We’ve been working in “main.tex” so far, but we can create as many files in this project as we want. Let’s create a new file called “letter.tex” and write our letter there.

LATEX

\documentclass{letter}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{Some Address\\Some Street\\Some City}

\opening{Dear Sir or Madam,}

The text goes Here

\closing{Yours,}

\end{letter}

\end{document}

Callout

Note the \\ used to create line breaks in the address - we’ll get back to line breaking in a bit.

Creating a Presentation

The slides document class was developed for making physical slides in the mid-1980s, and so doesn’t have any of the features we might use in modern presentations. Let’s create a simple presentation using the slides document class. Start another new document called “slides.tex”.

LATEX

\documentclass{slides}

\begin{document}

\begin{slide}
The slides document class is a good starting point for creating a presentation.
\end{slide}

\begin{slide}
Being entirely text-based, it's not as powerful or user-friendly as modern presentation software.
\end{slide}

\end{document}

When you compile this document, you should end up with a document that has two pages, each with the text of each slide centered in the middle of the page.

Function-rich Classes

The core classes included with base LaTeX are very stable, but this means they are also somewhat conservative in terms of features. Over time, third parties have developed a number of more powerful classes that add new features and functionality to LaTeX documents.

These include:

amsbook, amsart, and amsproc: classes for documents that use the American Mathematical Society’s style
beamer: a class for creating slide presentations
KOMA-Script: a set of classes that provide a more modern look and feel to LaTeX documents by providing parallel classes to the base classes
memoir: a class that provides a lot of functionality for creating books, reports, and articles

These classes have a lot of customization options that can be used to alter the appearance of the document to exactly match your needs. We’ll explore how to figure out how to use these classes in a later episode.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Which don’t belong?

Which of the following are not a standard LaTeX document class?

article
report
book
letter
presentation
memoir

Answer

presentation is not a standard LaTeX document class - the correct class is slides. Also memoir is not a standard LaTeX document class, but a third-party class.

Challenge 2: What happens?

Suppose we have the following LaTeX slide presentation, but we want to turn it into an article. We can change the document class from “slides” to “article”, but what happens? And why?

LATEX

\documentclass{slides}

\begin{document}

\begin{slide}
Apples are an edible fruit produced by an apple tree. The tree originated in Central Asia, but
has since been introduced to many other regions.
\end{slide}

\begin{slide}
Some popular apple varieties include:
\begin{itemize}
  \item Gala
  \item Fuji
  \item Golden Delicious
\end{itemize}
\end{slide}

\end{document}

Show me the solution

We can change the document class from “slides” to “article”, but the slide environment does not exist in the article document class. We end up with errors when we try to compile the document, complaining that the slide environment is not defined. We need to change the slide environments to sections or subsections to maintain the structure of the document:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\section{Apples}
Apples are an edible fruit produced by an apple tree. The tree originated in Central Asia, but
has since been introduced to many other regions.

\subsection{Popular Apple Varieties}
Some popular apple varieties include:
\begin{itemize}
  \item Gala
  \item Fuji
  \item Golden Delicious
\end{itemize}

\end{document}

Challenge 3: Make your own beamer slides

Consider the following minimal example of an initial beamer presentation. Let’s create a new file called “beamer.tex” and copy the following code as a template into it:

LATEX

\documentclass{beamer}
%Information to be included in the title page:
\title{Sample title}
\author{Anonymous}
\institute{Overleaf}
\date{2021}

\begin{document}

\frame{\titlepage}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Sample frame title}
This is some text in the first frame. This is some text in the first frame. This is some text in
the first frame.
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Adapt these slides in the following way:

Change the title to “LaTeX Workshop”
Change the name of the author to your name.
Change the institution name to “ABCD Project Group”.
Change the date to “2025”.
Change the frame title of the first slide after the title page to “What I have learned in this episode” and replace the example text on the slide with your key takeaway from this section.
Besides the title page and the slide after the title page, create a third slide with the title “What I learned in the previous episodes”.
Add an unordered list as content to this slide and describe in three bullet points your key takeaways from the previous episodes.

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{beamer}
%Information to be included in the title page:
\title{LaTeX Workshop}
\author{My Name}
\institute{ABCD Project Group}
\date{2025}

\begin{document}

\frame{\titlepage}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{What I have learned in this episode}
My key takeaway from this episode.
\end{frame}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{What I learned in the previous episodes}
\begin{itemize}
  \item Key learning 1
  \item Key learning 2
  \item Key learning 3
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Key Points

LaTeX document classes set the general layout of the document
The base document classes are article, report, book, letter, and slides
Third-party classes can provide additional features

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Extending LaTeX

Last updated on 2025-06-24 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can I extend LaTeX to suit my needs?
How can I define my own commands in LaTeX?

Objectives

Demonstrate how to extend LaTeX using packages.
Add custom commands to a LaTeX document.

Adding Packages

After we’ve declared a class, we can use the preamble section of our document to add one or more packages in order to extend LaTeX’s functionality. Packages are collections of commands and environments that add new features to LaTeX, for example:

Changing how some parts of LaTeX work.
Adding new commands.
Changing the appearance/design of the document.

We can add a package to our document by using the \usepackage command in the preamble of our document. For example, to add the geometry package to our document, we would add the following line to the preamble:

LATEX

\usepackage{geometry}

In addition to the name of the package in the curly braces, we can also add options to the package by adding them in square brackets before the package name. For example, to set the width of the text block in our document to 6cm, we would update this line to look like this:

LATEX

\usepackage[width = 6cm]{geometry}

Give this a try in our main.tex document to see what happens. When you render the document, you should see something like this:

However this isn’t what we really want, so we’ll remove this line from our document.

Changing the Design

It’s useful to be able to adjust some aspects of the design independent of the document class, for example, the page margins. We used the geometry package in our previous example to set the width of the text block, but now let’s use it to specifically set the margins of our document:

Callout

So far we’ve been showing the entire document in the examples. Going forward, we’ll only show the relevant sections of the document that we’re discussing, so keep in mind when we are talking about “adding this to the preamble” we mean adding it to the section of the document before the \begin{document} command.

Let’s add this to the preamble of our document:

LATEX

\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}

You should see that adding this package and setting the “margin” option to 1in has shrunk the margins of the document (try commenting out the \usepackage line with a % and recompiling to see the difference).

Defining Custom Commands

Using other people’s packages is great, but what if there is some kind of functionality we want to add to our document that isn’t covered by a package? Or some specific formatting we want to use repeatedly? We can define our own commands in LaTeX using the \newcommand command.

The \newcommand syntax looks like this:

LATEX

\newcommand{\commandname}[number of arguments]{definition}

Callout

We could be even more flexible by using an optional argument in our \newcommand. Then the general structure of the command looks like this

LATEX

\newcommand{\commandname}[number of arguments][default value for the first argument]{definition}

You can learn more about optional arguments in the last challenge of this episode.

As an example, let’s define a command that will highlight specific works in a document, so that they appear italicised and underlined. We could do this by writing \textbf{\underline{word}} around each word we want to highlight:

LATEX

This is my first \textbf{\underline{LaTeX}} document.

\section{Sections}

I can add content to my first \textbf{\underline{section}}!

We can add this to each of our important terms in our document - maybe it looks something like this:

Our document with keywords highlighted in bold and underlined.

In a long document this would quickly become tedious. Instead, let’s define a new command called \kw in the preamble of our document that will do this for us:

LATEX

% The \newcommand defines a new custom command
% Highlight Keywords using the \kw{} command
\newcommand{\kw}[1]{\textbf{\underline{#1}}}

Now we can use the \kw command to highlight words in our document:

LATEX

This is my first \kw{LaTeX} document.

\section{Sections}

I can add content to my first \kw{section}!

Callout

Let’s take a minute to go through and add the \kw command to all the keywords in our document.

LaTeX
section
subsection
lists
ordered
unordered

Show details

Related to the \newcommand command, we can also use the \renewcommand command to change the definition of an existing command. This is useful, for example, if we want to change the effect of a command partway through a document, or if we want to change the definition of a command that is already defined in a package. It has an identical syntax to the \newcommand command:

LATEX

\renewcommand{\commandname}[number of arguments]{definition}

Code Reuse

This also means that we can easily change the formatting of all the words we’ve highlighted by updating the definition of the \kw command. Let’s say we wanted to change the formatting to bold and change the color to blue:

Callout

Standard LaTeX does not have a built-in way to change the color of text, but we can use the xcolor package to do this by adding the \usepackage{xcolor} line to the preamble of our document:

LATEX

\usepackage{xcolor}

Let’s replace our \kw command with this new definition: \newcommand{\kw}[1]{\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{#1}}}

When we recompile the document we should see that the formatting of our keywords has changed all at once:

Our document with keywords highlighted in blue.

Defining Multiple Commands

We can define as many commands as we like in the preamble of our document. Let’s add another one that we can use to highlight commands in the document:

LATEX

% Italicise LaTeX commands
\newcommand{\cmd}[1]{\textit{#1}}

We’ll use this command in later sections.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Importing a new package

A useful package to preview what your document will look like before your write a lot of text is the lipsum package. This package provides sample text blocks from a common placeholder text.

How would you add the lipsum package to the preamble of your document?

Answer

Add the line \usepackage{lipsum} to the preamble of your document.

You can then use the \lipsum command in the body of your document to add some dummy text.

Challenge 2: What does this mean?

The definition of a new command in LaTeX is done with the \newcommand command. The syntax for this command is:

LATEX

\newcommand{\commandname}[number of arguments]{definition}

So if we modify the \kw command we defined above to look like this:

LATEX

\newcommand{\kw}[2]{\textcolor{#1}{\textbf{#2}}}

What would the new \kw command do? and how would we use it?

Output

The new \kw command would take two arguments: the first argument would be the color we want to use to highlight the word, and the second argument would be the word we want to highlight. We would use it like this:

LATEX

\kw{red}{my keyword}

Challenge 3: Can you write your own command with two arguments?

Suppose you want to define a new command that takes as input two words as arguments. This first word shall be written bold while the second word shall be written italic. Moreover, the first and the second word are separated by a comma followed by a whitespace.

Use \newcommand to define this command that takes two arguments as inputs and name it \bo_it. Write the following sentence into your LaTeX document using your new command \bo_it:

This newly defined command highlights these two words: Apple, Banana.

Output

The new \boit command would take two arguments: the first argument would be used with \tetxbf{#1} to make the first word appear bold, and the second argument would be used with \tetxit{#2} to make the first word appear italic. Between \tetxbf{#1} and \tetxit{#2}, we would write , to separate both words. We would use the new command like this:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand{\boit}[2]{\textbf{#1}, \textit{#2}}

\begin{document}

This newly defined command highlights these two words: \boit{Apple}{Banana}.

\end{document}

Challenge 4: Optional arguments

New commands can be made even more flexible by defining commands that take an optional argument. Then the general LaTeX code for this looks like this:

LATEX

\newcommand{\commandname}[number of arguments][default value for the first argument]{definition}

The optional argument can be accessed and changed by writing square brackets [] directly after the \commandname in the body of your document.

Consider the following, modified example of our \kw from before where we now use an optional argument.

LATEX

\newcommand{\kw}[2][red]{\textcolor{#1}{\textbf{#2}}}

In your LaTeX file, use the new \kw command to write down the words “Banana” in yellow, “Apple” in red, and “Blueberry” in blue. Each word should be written in a separate line.

Output

We can exploit the optional argument in \kw to write down the given words very efficiently. For the first word, we change the optional argument to “yellow”. For the second word, we stick with the default value of “red”. For the third word, we change the optional argument to “blue”.

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand{\kw}[2][red]{\textcolor{#1}{\textbf{#2}}}

\begin{document}

\kw[yellow]{Banana}

\kw{Apple}

\kw[blue]{Blueberry}


\end{document}

Key Points

We can extend LaTeX’s functionality by adding packages to our document.
We can define custom commands in LaTeX using the \newcommand command.

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Using Graphics

Last updated on 2025-06-24 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do I include images in a LaTeX document?

Objectives

Demonstrate how to include images in a LaTeX document.
Show how to position images manually / automatically in a LaTeX document.

The Graphicx Package

In order to use graphics in our document, we’ll need to use the graphicx package, which adds the \includegraphics command to LaTeX. We’ll add this to the preamble of our document:

LATEX

\usepackage{graphicx}

We can now include several types of images in our document, including:

JPEG
PNG
PDF
EPS

For the purposes of this lesson, we’ll use the following image:

Callout

Download this image to your computer either be right-clicking on the image and selecting “Save Image As…” or by clicking on the image and saving it from the browser.

You can use any image you like for this lesson. Just make sure to replace example-image.PNG with the name of your image in the following examples.

Uploading Images to Overleaf

In order to incorporate an image into our document, we’ll need to upload it to Overleaf. We can do this by clicking on the “Upload” icon on the upper left corner of the Overleaf editor:

We can then either drag and drop the image into the upload window or click on the “Select files” button to choose the image from our computer.

Once you have uploaded the image, you should see it in the “Files” section of the Overleaf editor:

Show details

You can also use the “From external URL” option to add an image directly from a URL, which would let you use an image from a website directly without having to download it first.

Including an Image in a LaTeX Document

Now that we have our image uploaded, we can include it in our document using the \includegraphics command:

LATEX

\section{Graphics}

We can include \kw{images} in our document using the \cmd{graphicx} package, which lets us use the
\cmd{includegraphics} command.

\includegraphics{example-image.PNG}

Your document should now look like this:

Callout

If you just want to see how an image might look in your document without having to upload one, you can use the filepath example-image in the \includegraphics command. This will display a placeholder image in your document that you can replace later.

Adjusting the appearance of the image

But wait! The image is too big, and it doesn’t fit on the page, so LaTeX has moved it to the next page. Since the image is a little too large to fit on the same page as the text, LaTeX has moved it automatically to the next page. Let’s address that by making the image smaller.

We can adjust the appearance of the image by passing options to the \includegraphics command, just like we did earlier with the geometry package. For example, we can specify the height of the image:

LATEX

\subsection{Small Image}

We can pass parameters to the \cmd{includegraphics} command to adjust the appearance of the image.

\includegraphics[height=2cm]{example-image.PNG}

Other possible options include:

\begin{itemize}
  \item width: the width of the image
  \item scale: the scaling factor of the image
  \item angle: the angle of rotation of the image
  \item clip: whether to clip the image to its bounding box
  \item trim: trim the image by a specified amount
  \item draft: display a box instead of the image
\end{itemize}

Callout

Some other possible options from the graphicx package include:

width: the width of the image
scale: the scaling factor of the image
angle: the angle of rotation of the image
clip: whether to clip the image to its bounding box
trim: trim the image by a specified amount
draft: display a box instead of the image

Positioning the image

We can place the image inside of an environment to help position it in the document. Let’s try placing the \includegraphics command inside of a \begin{center} and \end{center} environment:

LATEX

\subsection{Centered Image}

By placing the \cmd{includegraphics} command inside a center environment, we can center the
image on the page.

\begin{center}
  \includegraphics[height=2cm]{example-image.PNG}
\end{center}

You should see that the image is now centered on the page:

“Floating” Images

It’s often the case that images need to “float” around the document as new text is added or removed. this is called a “floating” image. Images are normally included as floats so that we don’t end up with large gaps in the document.

To make an image float, we can use the figure environment:

LATEX

\subsection{Floating Image}

\kw{Floating images} can move around the page as text is added or removed. We can use the
\cmd{figure}environment to create a floating image.

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2cm]{example-image.PNG}
\end{figure}

When we render the document, we can see that, even though we placed the image at the end of the document, it appears at the top of the page:

Callout

You might have noticed that instead of using the \begin{center} and \end{center} environment, we used the \centering command inside of the figure environment. This is because the figure environment is a floating environment, and the \centering command is the recommended way to center content inside of a floating environment.

Controlling the Position of a Floating Image

We can pass parameters to the figure environment to control the position of the floating image:

h: Place the float “here” (where it appears in the code)
t: Place the float at the “top” of the page
b: Place the float at the “bottom” of the page
p: Place the float on a “page” by itself

It is also possible to combine these options. For example, to place the float here if possible, but otherwise at the top of the page, we can use the ht option. Let’s update our figure environment to use the ht option:

LATEX

\begin{figure}[ht]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2cm]{example-image.PNG}
\end{figure}

Control the position of a floating image by passing parameters to the \cmd{figure} environment:

\begin{itemize}
  \item h: Place the float "here" (where it appears in the code)
  \item t: Place the float at the "top" of the page
  \item b: Place the float at the "bottom" of the page
  \item p: Place the float on a "page" by itself
\end{itemize}

Callout

You can use the package wrapfig together with graphicx in your preamble. This makes the wrapfigure environment available and we can place an \includegraphics command inside it to create a figure around which text will be wrapped. Here is how we can specify a wrapfigure environment:

LATEX

\begin{wrapfigure}[lineheight]{position}{width}
  ...
\end{wrapfigure}

We will describe the wrapfigure environment in more detail in one of the challenges below.

Adding a Caption

We can add a caption to our image by using the \caption command inside of the figure environment:

LATEX

\subsection{Caption}

We can add a \kw{caption} to our floating image by using the \cmd{caption} command inside of the
\cmd{figure} environment.

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2cm]{example-image.PNG}
  \caption{This is a caption for our image.}
\end{figure}

When we render the document, we can see that the caption appears below the image:

Callout

Note that the caption is automatically numbered “Figure 1”. Very handy! We’ll see how we can automatically reference figures and tables in a later episode.

Show details

Another package that we can use to work with images in LaTeX is the hvfloat package. This package is an alterantive way of controlling the position of floating elemnents in LaTeX, like images and tables. It provides a more flexible way of positioning floats allowing us to, for example, place a float at the bottom of the page, even if there is not enough space for it to fit.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Can you do it?

Consider again our running example of example-image.PNG. Include this image into your LaTeX document by using the figure environment. Make sure that your image is centered and rotate the image by 45 degree. Add the following caption to your image: “This caption has a bold word included.” How would your LaTeX look like?

Output

We use the \centering command in the figure environment and specify angle=45 to rotate the image.

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[angle=45]{example-image.PNG}
  \caption{This caption has a \textbf{bold} word included.}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Challenge 2: What is wrong here?

Have a look at the following LaTeX code:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\centering
\begin{figure}
  \includegraphics[height=3cm, draft]{example-image.PNG}
  \caption{This caption has a \textbf{bold} word included.}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Can you spot all the errors in this LaTeX code? Change the code such that the image is displayed with a height of 3cm, width of 4cm and centered.

Show me the solution

First, the command \usepackage{graphicx} is missing in the preamble. Second, the \centering command has to be placed into the figure environment. Third, the draft argument has to be removed from and width=4cm added to the \includegraphics command.

The corrected LaTeX code looks like this:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=3cm, width=4cm]{example-image.PNG}
  \caption{This caption has a \textbf{bold} word included.}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Challenge 3: Making a command for images

In the previous section, we created a command to highlight keywords in our document. Let’s create a new command to make it easier to include images in our document. We’ll create a command called \centeredimage that takes two arguments: the image filename and the caption. The resulting image should be centered on the page and have a caption below it. Use the example-image.png from earlier in this episode.

Your file should look like this:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}

% Define our new command
%%% YOUR COMMAND HERE %%%

\begin{document}

\centeredimage{example-image.png}{"My Image"}
\centeredimage{example-image.png}{"My Other Image"}

\end{document}

And your output should look like this.

Reminder: The syntax for creating a new command is:

LATEX

\newcommand{\cmdname}[numargs]{definition}

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}

% Define our new command
\newcommand{\centeredimage}[2]{
  \begin{figure}
    \centering
    \includegraphics{#1}
    \caption{#2}
  \end{figure}
}

\begin{document}

\centeredimage{example-image.png}{"My Image"}
\centeredimage{example-image.png}{"My Other Image"}

\end{document}

Challenge 4: The `wrapfig` package.

Have a look at the following LaTeX code that uses the wrapfigure environment. Can you already guess how the images will be displayed in your document?

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{wrapfig}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

\begin{wrapfigure}{r}{0.1\textwidth}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.1\textwidth, height=0.1\textwidth]{example-image.PNG}
\end{wrapfigure}

The package wrapfigure lets you position images around your text.
That comes in handy if you want to integrate images seamlessly into your written sentences.
Therefore, I add a few more sentences here to showcase this integration to you.

\begin{wrapfigure}{l}{0.1\textwidth}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.1\textwidth, height=0.1\textwidth]{example-image.PNG}
\end{wrapfigure}

Be careful, you need both packages, wrapfig and graphicx, in your preamble to display your images
and wrap them accordingly. There are several ways to display images, depending on the arguments you
specify. For instance, you can scale the image width according to the width of the text.

\end{document}

Show me the solution

The first image will be placed at the right of the following paragraph of text as {r} is specified as an argument within the first wrapfigure environment. The second image will be placed at the left of its following paragraph of text as {l} is specified as an argument within the second wrapfigure environment. Moreover, both images are scaled by being 0.1 of the width of the text in your document.

Key Points

The graphicx package allows us to include images in our LaTeX document.
We can adjust the appearance of images using options in the \includegraphics command.
We can position images manually or automatically using environments like center and figure.
Floating images can move around the page as text is added or removed.
We can control the position of floating images using parameters in the figure environment.
We can add captions to floating images using the \caption command.

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Tables

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do I add tables to a LaTeX document?
How can I format a table in a LaTeX document?

Objectives

Create a table in a LaTeX document.
Customize the appearance of a table in a LaTeX document.
Add horizontal lines to a table in a LaTeX document.

Defining Tables

Tables in LaTeX are set using the tabular environment. For our purposes here, we are going to use the array package to create a table, which provides additional functionality for creating tables. We’ll add this to the preamble of our document:

LATEX

\usepackage{array}

Callout

As we start to add more and more packages to our preamble, it can get a bit unwieldy. For now, let’s just keep them alphabetized to make it keep things organized. Our imports should now look like this:

LATEX

\usepackage{array}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{xcolor}

In order to create a table, we need to tell latex how many columns we will need and how they should be aligned.

Available column types are:

Column Type	Description
`l`	left-aligned
`c`	centered
`r`	right-aligned
`p{width}`	a column with fixed width; the text will be automatically line wrapped and fully justified
`m{width}`	like p, but vertically centered compared to the rest of the row
`b{width}`	like p, but bottom aligned
`w{align}{width}`	prints the contents with a fixed width, silently overprinting if things get larger. (You can choose the horizontal alignment using l, c, or r.)
`W{align}{width}`	like w, but this will issue an overfull box warning if things get too wide.

Callout

The columns l, c and r will have the natural width of the widest entry in the column. Each column must be declared, so if you want a table with three centered columns, you would use ccc as the column declaration.

Creating a Table

Now that we have the array package loaded and we know how to define columns, we can create a table using the tabular environment.

Callout

Note that the & and \\ characters are aligned in our example. This isn’t strictly necessary in LaTeX, but it makes the code much easier to read.

LATEX

\section{Tables}

\kw{Tables} are defined using the \cmd{tabular} environment.

\begin{tabular}{lll}
  Fruit  & Quantity & Price \\
  Apple  & 5        & 1.50  \\
  Banana & 6        & 2.00  \\
  Orange & 4        & 1.20  \\
\end{tabular}

This will create a table with three columns, all left-aligned. The values of each row are separated by & and the rows are separated by \\. We do not yet have any horizontal lines in the table, so it will look like this:

Callout

If your table has many columns, it may get cumbersome to write out the column definitions every time. In this case you can make things easier by using *{num}{string} to repeat the string num times. For example, in our table above, we can instead write:

LATEX

\begin{tabular}{*{3}{l}}
  Fruit  & Quantity & Price \\
  Apple  & 5        & 1.50  \\
  Banana & 6        & 2.00  \\
  Orange & 4        & 1.20  \\
\end{tabular}

Adding Horizontal Lines

We’re going to introduce another package here: booktabs. This package provides a few commands that make it easier to create professional looking tables. To use it, add the following to your preamble:

LATEX

\usepackage{booktabs}

booktabs provides three commands for creating horizontal lines in your table:

\toprule: creates a line at the top of the table
\midrule: creates a line in the middle of the table
\bottomrule: creates a line at the bottom of the table

Horizontal lines make tables easier to read and understand, and they can be used to separate the header from the body of the table, and the body from the footer. We can insert these commands into our table to add horizontal lines:

LATEX

\subsection{Tables with Horizontal Lines}

We can use the \cmd{\textbackslash toprule}, \cmd{\textbackslash midrule}, and
\cmd{\textbackslash bottomrule} commands from the \cmd{booktabs} package to create horizontal
lines in our table.

\begin{tabular}{*{3}{l}}
  \toprule
  Fruit  & Quantity & Price \\
  \midrule
  Apple  & 5        & 1.50  \\
  Banana & 6        & 2.00  \\
  Orange & 4        & 1.20  \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Your table should look something like this:

Example output of a table with horizontal lines

Callout

A general recommendation is to use lines sparsely in your tables, and vertical lines should be avoided.

Partial Horizontal Lines

Another useful feature of booktabs is the ability to create partial horizontal lines with the \cmidrule command. This command accepts the arguments {number-number}, where the first number is the column to start the line and the second number is the column to end the line.

LATEX

\subsection{Partial Horizontal Lines}

The \cmd{\textbackslash cmidrule} command can be used to create partial horizontal lines in a
table. The command accepts the arguments {number-number}, where the first number is the column to
start the line and last number is the column to end the line.

\begin{tabular}{*{3}{l}}
  \toprule
  Fruit  & Quantity &  Price \\
  \midrule
  Apple  & 5        &  1.50  \\
  Banana & 6        &  2.00  \\
  Orange & 4        &  1.20  \\
  \cmidrule{3-3}
  Total & 15        & 28.20  \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

This table should come out looking something like this:

Example output of a table with partial lines

Merging Cells

We can merge cells horizontally using the \multicolumn command. This command takes three arguments:

The number of cells which should be merged
The alignment of the merged cell (l, c, or r)
The contents of the merged cell

LATEX

\subsection{Merging Cells}

Merge cells horizontally using the \cmd{\textbackslash multicolumn} command. This command takes
three arguments:

\begin{itemize}
  \item The number of cells which should be merged
  \item The alignment of the merged cell (l, c, or r)
  \item The contents of the merged cell
\end{itemize}

\begin{tabular}{*{3}{l}}
  \toprule
  \multicolumn{3}{c}{Overall Inventory} \\
  Fruit  & Quantity &  Price  \\
  \midrule
  Apple  & 5        &  1.50   \\
  Banana & 6        &  2.00   \\
  Orange & 4        &  1.20   \\
  \midrule
  \multicolumn{2}{c}{Summary} \\
  Total & 15        & 28.20   \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Callout

Vertical merging is supported in LaTeX by using the multirow package which has the \multirow command equipped with it. It is similarly structured as \multicolumn by using three arguments:

The number of rows which should be merged
The width of the column (i.e. 4em)
The contents of the merged rows.

You can find an example in the challenges below.

This will create a table that looks like this:

Example output of a table with merged cells

Challenges

Challenge 1: Can you do it?

Try to replicate the following table in LaTeX:

Make	Model	Sold
Volkswagen	Golf	7,687
Skoda	Octavia	4,078
Seat	Leon	3,922
Volkswagen	Passat	3,776
Mercedes	GLK,GLC	3,143
	Total	22,606

Your LaTaX version should look something like this.

Note that the last row is a bit different from the others. The first two columns re merged, the text “Total” is right-aligned and bold, and the value in the last column is italicized.

(Data for this challenge is from Statista)

Answer

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{booktabs}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{lll}
  \toprule
  Make        & Model   & Sold   \\
  \midrule
  Volkswagen  & Golf    & 7,687 \\
  Skoda       & Octavia & 4,078 \\
  Seat        & Leon    & 3,922 \\
  Volkswagen  & Passat  & 3,776 \\
  Mercedes    & GLK,GLC & 3,143 \\
  \midrule
  \multicolumn{2}{r}{\textbf{Total}} & \textit{22,606} \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Challenge 2: Merging rows.

Consider the following LaTeX code that creates a table using the command \multirow. Can you guess how this table will look like? How many columns will it have? How many rows? Are any rows or columns combined?

LATEX


\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{multirow}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{*{4}{l}}
  \toprule
    & Food & Quantity &  Price  \\
  \midrule
  \multirow{3}{4em}{Fruit} & Apple  & 5  &  1.50   \\
  & Banana & 6        &  2.00   \\
  & Orange & 4        &  1.20   \\
  \midrule
  \multirow{2}{4em}{Cheese} & Brie & 2 & 3.30 \\
   & Asiago   & 3 & 2.90   \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Show me the solution

The table will have 4 columns where the first column does not have a column name. The table will have 6 rows. The first row is the column name row. Rows 2 to 4 are merged for “Fruit”. Rows 5 and 6 are merged for “Cheese”.

Hint: We want to make sure the caption stays with the table, so we should put the table inside an environment. For images we use the “figure” environment, but for tables we can use the “table” environment.

Challenge 3: Adding merged rows to your table.

Consider again the LaTeX code for the table in challenge 3. Add four more rows to this table that contain information about the following four sorts of bread:

Brioche, 3, 3.00
Bagel, 2, 3.50
Matzah, 4, 3.60
Naan, 2, 3.40

Use \multirow to subsume those bread types under the category “Bread”.

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{multirow}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{*{4}{l}}
  \toprule
    & Food & Quantity &  Price  \\
  \midrule
  \multirow{3}{4em}{Fruit} & Apple  & 5  &  1.50   \\
  & Banana & 6        &  2.00   \\
  & Orange & 4        &  1.20   \\
  \midrule
  \multirow{2}{4em}{Cheese} & Brie & 2 & 3.30 \\
   & Asiago   & 3 & 2.90   \\
   \midrule
  \multirow{4}{4em}{Bread} & Brioche & 3 & 3.00 \\
  & Bagel & 2 & 3.50 \\
  & Matzah & 4 & 3.60 \\
  & Naan & 2 & 3.40 \\
  \bottomrule
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Challenge 4: Making the Table Colorful

We used the xcolor package to add color to our text in an earlier episode. Can you use the xcolor package to make the header and summary rows of the table in Challenge 1 a different color? What about changing the color of the text in the summary row? Can we make the rows of the table alternate colors?

A few things that will help you: - We need to import the xcolor package in the preamble of our document. - The xcolor package doesn’t automatically support coloring tables, so we need to add the table option to the package import. - \rowcolor{(<color>} - \rowcolors{<starting row number>}{<color1>}{<color2>} - You can make lighter versions of colors by adding !<percentage> to the color name. For example, red!10 is a light red color, while red!90 is a darker red color.

There’s no right answer to this challenge, so feel free to experiment with different colors! Here’s an example of what you can do.

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor} % Import xcolor with the table option

\begin{document}

\begin{table}[ht]
  \centering
  \rowcolors{2}{red!10}{gray!10} % Alternate row colors between red and gray
  \begin{tabular}{lll}
    \toprule
    \rowcolor{green!20} % Set the header row color to green
    Make          & Model            & Sold  \\
    \midrule
    Volkswagen    & Golf             & 7,687 \\
    Skoda         & Octavia          & 4,078 \\
    Seat          & Leon             & 3,922 \\
    Volkswagen    & Passat           & 3,776 \\
    Mercedes      & GLK,GLC          & 3,143 \\
    \midrule
    \rowcolor{blue!20} % Set the summary row color to blue
    \multicolumn{2}{r}{
      % Set the text color to blue and bold for the summary row
      \textbf{\textcolor{blue!75}{Total}}} & \textit{\textcolor{blue!75}{22,606}} \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}

  \caption{Car Sales by Make/Model (January 2025)} % Add a caption to the table

\end{table}

\end{document}

Key Points

Tables in LaTeX are created using the tabular environment.
The array package provides additional functionality for creating tables.
The booktabs package provides commands for creating horizontal lines in tables.
The \multicolumn command can be used to merge cells in a table.
The \multirow command in the multirow package can be used to merge rows in a table.

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Adding Cross References

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can I ensure that numbers in my document are automatically updated?
How can I refer to numbered elements in my document?

Objectives

Insert a cross-reference in a LaTeX document.
Refer to a cross-referenced element in a LaTeX document.

Cross References

When writing a document of any length, you’ll often want to refer to numbered elements such as figures, tables, equations, or sections. LaTeX provides a way to automatically number these elements and refer to them in your text.

Label and Ref

To have LaTex remember a specific spot in your document, you have to use the \label{} command to mark it, and the \ref{} command to refer to it. For example:

LATEX

\section{Cross References}
\label{sec:cross-references}

\subsection{Material for the Introduction}

In this section, we introduce two new concepts:

\begin{tabular}{cp{9cm}}
  Command & Description \\
  \toprule
  \kw{label} & Marks a spot in the document \\
  \kw{ref} & Refers to a marked spot in the document \\
  \bottomrule
\label{tab:cross-reference-commands}
\end{tabular}

We can \kw{refer} to the section with the \cmd{ref} command, like this: \ref{sec:cross-references}.
We can likewise refer to the table like this: \ref{tab:cross-reference-commands}.

Callout

The sec and tab prefixes in the \label{} command are not required, but they help to identify the type of element being labeled. This is especially useful when you have many labels in your document.

The label command always refers to the previous numbered entry: a section, a table, a figure, etc. This means that the \label{} command should always come after the numbered element you want to refer to.

Callout

Note that the ref command does not insert the section or table name, but rather the number associated with it. We would still write “Refer to Table $\ref{tab:cross-reference-commands}$”, but the benefit is that if the table number changes because we’ve added or removed sections before it, the reference will update automatically.

There are packages that can provide more advanced cross-referencing capabilities, such as the cleveref package, which can automatically detect the type of element being referenced and insert the appropriate name. For more details about this, refer to the references section.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Add a figure, then reference it.

In your LaTeX document, include the image example-image.PNG and cross-reference it in the text. Make sure the figure has a caption and is labeled and centered properly. Use the \includegraphics command to add the image and wrap it in a figure environment. Then, refer to it in the text using the \ref command.

You may find the following LaTeX template helpful.

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}

\section{Cross-referencing Figures}



\end{document}

Show me the solution

As shown in $\ref{tab:findings}$ post-treatment values are higher…

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}


\begin{document}

\section{Cross-referencing Figures}

Here is an example of a figure in the document. We will refer to it later in the text.

\begin{figure}[ht]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=4cm]{example-image.PNG}
  \caption{This is an example figure.}
  \label{fig:example-image}
\end{figure}

In the text, we can refer to the figure using its label: Figure \ref{fig:example-image}.

\end{document}

Challenge 2: Where does the reference go?

We mentioned that the \label{} command should always come after the numbered element you want to refer to. What do you think would happen if we put the \label{} command before the numbered element? For example:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
\lipsum[1]

\label{sec:methods}
\section{Methodology}
\lipsum[2]

\section{Findings}
As indicated in Section \ref{sec:methods}, \lipsum[3][2]

\end{document}

The \lipsum package is a nice way of quickly generating large amounts of placeholder text - great if you just want to get an idea of how your document will look!

Before you run the code, think about what will happen. What do you expect the output to be? Run the code and see if your expectations were correct. Why or why not?

Show me the solution

You might have expected the output to be either “As indicated in Section 2, …” or “As indicated in Section ???”, but it actually returns “As indicated in Section 1, …”. This is because the \label{} command marks the section number immediately preceding it. In this case, the \label{} command is placed before the \section{Methodology} command, so it marks the section number of the previous section, which is the Introduction section. The fact that the Introduction section already has a label does not matter.

Challenge 3: What’s wrong with this code?

Here’s a section from a larger document. Why might the references not be working as expected? (This is a tiny but common issue!)

LATEX

\section{Findings}
\label{sec:findings}

\begin{table}[ht]
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{lll}
    \toprule
    Color & Pre-treatment & Post-treatment \\
    \midrule
    Blue  & 30\% & 35\% \\
    Green & 15\% & 55\% \\
    Red   & 10\% & 12\% \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}
  \caption{Findings from the survey.}
  \label{tab:findings}
\end{table}

As shown in \ref{tab:findings} post-treatment values are higher...

The document compiles without error, but the reference text has an issue. What is it? Why does this happen?

Show me the solution

The \ref{} command is correctly written, but the \ref{} command only returns the number of the label it is referring to. In this case, it will return the number of the table, not the name of the table. To fix this, you can write “As shown in Table $\ref{tab:findings}$…”

Key Points

The \label{} command marks a spot in the document.
The \ref{} command refers to a marked spot in the document.

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Mathematics

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do I add mathematical expressions to a LaTeX document?

Objectives

Create Inline and Display Math Mode expressions in LaTeX

Math Mode

Typesetting mathematical expressions in LaTeX is one of its greatest strengths. We can mark up mathematical content in a logical way in what is known as math mode.

There are two kinds of math mode in LaTeX:

Inline math mode: for typesetting math within a line of text
Display math mode: for typesetting math on its own line

Inline Math Mode

Inline math mode is marked using a pair of dollar sign symbols ( $ ... $ ). It is also possible to use the notation $...$ to mark inline math mode. Simple expressions are entered without any special markup, and you’ll see that the math is spaced out nicely and has letters in italic.

LATEX

\section{Mathematics}

There are two kinds of math mode in LaTeX: inline and display. Inline math mode is marked with
a pair of dollar signs, whereas display math mode is marked with a pair of square brackets.

\subsection{Inline Math Mode}

The Pythagorean theorem is $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$.

There are a lot of symbols and specialist math mode commands available in LaTeX:

Superscripts: x^2
Subscripts: x_1
Greek letters: \alpha, \beta, \gamma, etc.
Operators: \times, \div, \sin, \log, etc.
Fractions: \frac{numerator}{denominator}
Roots: \sqrt{expression}
Sums and integrals: \sum, \int, \oint, etc.
Brackets: (), [], {}, \langle, \rangle, etc.

Display Math Mode

Display math mode uses the exact same commands as inline math mode, but it is centered by default and is intended for larger equations that are “part of a paragraph”. It is also started and ended with a pair of square brackets (\[ ... \]).

Callout

Remember that [ and ] are special characters in LaTeX, which is why we have to “escape” it with a backslash(\) here.

LATEX

\subsection{Display Math Mode}

The Fourier Transform is defined as:

\[
\hat{f}(\xi) = \int_{-\infty}^\infty f(x) e^{-2\pi i \xi x} \, dx
\]

Where:

\begin{itemize}
  \item \( f(x) \) is the function we are transforming,
  \item \( \hat{f}(\xi) \) is the Fourier Transform of \( f(x) \),
  \item \( \xi \) is the frequency variable,
  \item \( i \) is the imaginary unit.
\end{itemize}

Show details

Math Mode in LaTeX is not just for LaTeX users! It is also used other tools like Jupyter Notebooks, R Markdown and many markdown processors. There are even extensions for Google Docs and Microsoft Word that allow you to use LaTeX math mode.

Math in Enviroments

We can include math in an environment called equation to number the equations:

LATEX

\subsection{Math in Environments}

The quadratic formula is:

\begin{equation}
x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}
\label{eq:quadratic}
\end{equation}

This will allow us to refer to the equation later in the document with \cmd{ref} like this:
Refer to Equation \ref{eq:quadratic}.

We can now refer to this equation using the \ref command, just like we did in the previous section:

LATEX

The quadratic formula is given in Equation~\ref{eq:quadratic}.

The `amsmath` Package

Mathematical notation is very rich, and the tools in the LaTeX kernel are sometimes not enough to cover everything. The amsmath package extends the capabilities of LaTeX for more complex mathematical typesetting. Let’s try it out:

Add the following to your document:

(In the preamble)

LATEX

\usepackage{amsmath}

(In the body)

LATEX

\subsection{The `amsmath` Package}

Solve the following recurrence for $ n,k\geq 0 $:
\[
Q_{n,0} = 1   \quad Q_{0,k} = [k=0];
\]

\[
Q_{n,k} = Q_{n-1,k}+Q_{n-1,k-1}+\binom{n}{k}, \quad\text{for $n$, $k>0$.}
\]

That look ok, but we really want the equations to be aligned vertically, not centered on the page. We can use the align environment from the amsmath package to do this:

LATEX

\usepackage{amsmath}

LATEX

\subsection{The `amsmath` Package}

Solve the following recurrence for $ n,k\geq 0 $:
\begin{align*}
  Q_{n,0} &= 1   \quad Q_{0,k} = [k=0];  \\
  Q_{n,k} &= Q_{n-1,k}+Q_{n-1,k-1}+\binom{n}{k}, \quad\text{for $n$, $k>0$.}
\end{align*}

The align* environment makes the equations line up on the amperstand (&)

There’s far too many options to cover here, but the amsmath User Guide contains many more examples.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Can you do it?

See if you can write the following mathematical expression in LaTeX:

Special Relativity: t’ = t / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)

Output

LATEX

\[
t' = \frac{t}{\sqrt{1 - \frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
\]

Challenge 2: What’s wrong with this?

What’s wrong with the following LaTeX code?

LATEX

\(F = G * (m_1 m_2) / r^2 \)

Show me the solution

The code is missing the \frac command to create a fraction. The correct code should be:

LATEX

\(F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2} \)

Challenge 3: The `amsmath` package and referencing equations

Add the following equation to your document: E = mc^2. For this, use the amsmath package and a numbered align environment. Label the equation using \label. Then, use the \ref command to refer to the equation in the text. You may find the following LaTeX template helpful:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath} % For better equation formatting

\begin{document}

\section{Referencing Equations}






\end{document}

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath} % For better equation formatting

\begin{document}

\section{Referencing Equations}

We can include a numbered equation as follows:

\begin{equation}
  E = mc^2
  \label{eq:energy}
\end{equation}

Now, we refer to the equation in the text. The famous equation is \ref{eq:energy}.

\end{document}

Key Points

Inline math mode is marked with $ ... $ or $...$
Display math mode is marked with \[ ... \]

Show details

After this episode, here is what our LaTeX document looks like.

Content from Fonts and Spacing

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can we set paragraph spacing in LaTeX?
How can we customize text formatting in LaTeX?
How can we align text in LaTeX?

Objectives

Add custom spacing between paragraphs in LaTeX.
Create a title page with custom text formatting.

Paragraph Spacing

A common style in LaTeX is to have no indents for paragraphs, but to incorporate a blank line between them. We can achieve this using the parskip package.

We’re going to use another package here just to show off some commands without having to write a lot of text: the lipsum package. This package provides the \lipsum command, which generates “Lorem Ipsum” text.

LATEX

\usepackage{lipsum}

Callout

Lorem Ipsum is a common piece of placeholder text used in publishing and graphic design. It is often used to demonstrate the visual form of a document without relying on meaningful content.

The text itself comes from the first-century BC work De finibus bonorum et malorum by Marcus Tullius Cicero.

In our document, we can now use a blank line to separate paragraphs:

LATEX

\section{Fonts and Spacing}

% Generate some "Lorem Ipsum" text
% The parameters mean "include paragraphs 1 thru 2" from the "Lorem Ipsum" text
\lipsum[1-2]

Compile the document and take a look at our section. You should see that our first paragraph has no indent, and there is no blank line between it and the following paragraph. The second paragraph does have an indent. This is the default behavior in LaTeX.

Now let’s add our package:

LATEX

\usepackage[parfill]{parskip}

Keep an eye on the preview pane as you compile the document. You should see that the first paragraph now has a blank line between it and the second paragraph, and there is no indent on the first line of the second paragraph.

Forcing a New Line

Most of the time, you should not force a new line in your document; you almost certainly want to use a new paragraph or parskip instead. However, there are a few places where you might want to force a new line:

At the end of table rows
Inside a center environment
In poetry (the verse environment)

To force a new line, we can use the \\ command.

Adding Explicit Space

We can insert a thin space (about half the normal thickness) use the \, command.

Callout

In math mode, there are also other commands:

\. for a “dot” space
\: for a “colon” space
\; for a “thick” space
\! for a “negative” space
\, for a “thin” space

Very rarely, for example when creating a title page, you might want to add explicit horizontal or vertical space. We can do this using the \hspace and \vspace commands:

LATEX

\hspace{1cm} % 1cm of horizontal space
\vspace{1cm} % 1cm of vertical space

We can also use the \vfill command to fill the remaining space on a page. This is useful for centering content vertically on a page.

Explicit Text Formatting

We’ve touched on this in previous episodes, but we can also use the following commands to format text explicitly:

\textbf{} for bold text
\textit{} for italic text
\textrm{} for roman text
\textsf{} for sans serif text
\texttt{} for typewriter text
\textsc{} for small caps text

We can set the font size in the same way. All sizes are relative to the base font size:

\huge for huge text
\large for large text
\normalsize for normal text
\small for small text
\footnotesize for footnote text

Text Alignment

We can align text using the following commands:

\centering to center text
\raggedright to left-align text
\raggedleft to right-align text

Creating a Title Page

Using all of this, let’s create a simple title page for our document. We’ll put this just after the \begin{document} command, and enclose everything in a titlepage environment:

LATEX

\begin{titlepage}
    \centering

    \huge
    \textbf{My Example Document}

    \vspace{1cm}
    \normalsize
    \textit{An example of a LaTeX document}

    \vfill
    January 1, 2000
\end{titlepage}

Callout

The titlepage environment is a special environment that LaTeX uses to create a title page. It sets some simple formating rules, like removing multiple columns and resetting the page number. It also prevents styling rules we add like centering from affecting the rest of the document.

Instructor Note

Inline instructor notes can help inform instructors of timing challenges associated with the lessons. They appear in the “Instructor View”

Challenges

Challenge 1: Create a Title Page with Custom Formatting

Using the content covered, create a title page with custom formatting. Your title page should have:

A centered title “My Custom LaTeX Title Page” in large, bold text.
A centered subtitle “A Sample Document with Custom Formatting” in italic text, smaller than the title.
The date centered at the bottom of the page.

You can use the commands \vspace and \vfill to make fill blank space between the items and may find the following LaTeX template helpful:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
    



\end{titlepage}

\end{document}

Output

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
    \centering
    \huge
    \textbf{My Custom LaTeX Title Page}

    \vspace{1cm} % Space between title and subtitle
    \normalsize
    \textit{A Sample Document with Custom Formatting}

    \vfill % Fill remaining space
    \large
    January 1, 2025
\end{titlepage}

\end{document}

Challenge 2: Adjust Paragraph Spacing in Your Document

Create a LaTeX document with the following:

Use the parskip package to adjust the paragraph spacing.
Generate some text using the lipsum package.
Ensure that paragraphs are separated by a blank line (without indentation).

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}  % To generate sample text
\usepackage[parfill]{parskip}  % Adds space between paragraphs without indentation

\begin{document}

\section{Paragraph Spacing Example}

% Generating Lorem Ipsum text with the lipsum package
\lipsum[1-2]

\end{document}

Key Points

Use the parskip package to add space between paragraphs
Force a new line with \\
Add explicit space with \hspace and \vspace
Format text explicitly with \textbf, \textit, etc.
Align text with \centering, \raggedright, and \raggedleft

Content from Citations and References

Last updated on 2025-06-24 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do I add bibliographic references to my document?
How do I format my references in LaTeX?
How do I cite references in my document?

Objectives

Learn how to use a reference database to manage references in LaTeX documents.
Explore different ways of citing references in our document.

Citations and References

For bibliographic citations, while you can include references sources directly in our document, usually you will get that information from one or more external files. Such a file is a database of references, containing the information in a processing-friendly format (which is called BibTeX). Using one or more reference databases lets you re-use information and avoid manual formatting.

Reference Databases (BiBTeX)

Reference databases are normally referred to as BiBTeX files, and have the extension .bib. They contain one or more entries, one for each reference, and within each are a series of fields.

Create a new file in your project called sample-references.bib and add the following content:

BIBTEX

@article{Thomas2008,
  author  = {Thomas, Christine M.},
  title   = {The Fascinating World of Penguins},
  journal = {Penguin Chronicles},
  year    = {2008},
  pages   = {7009-7024},
}
@book{Graham1995,
  author    = {Richard L. Graham and Lisa A. Harris},
  title     = {The Humble Paperclip: Master of the Modern Office},
  publisher = {Scranton Press},
  year      = {1995},
}

This is an example of a BiBTeX file that contains a reference for an article and another for a book. Each entry type starts with a the @ symbol, followed by the type of the referencing item (e.g. article) and all information appears within a pair of curly braces {}.

The various fields are given in key-value format. Exactly which fields you need to give depends on the type of entry.

Callout

You might notice that in the author field, each entry is separated by the word and. This is essential: the format of the output needs to know which author is which.

You might also notice that in the article title, some entries are in an extra set of braces. This is to prevent any case-changing that might be applied to the title.

The BibTeX Format

Editing BiBTeX files by hand can be difficult and tedious. A number of tools exist to help you manage your reference files. You can find a list of sugggested tools in the references section.

We’re going to cover two different ways to include references in our document: using the natbib package and using the biblatex package. For the purposes of this workshop, we’ll use biblatex, but feel free to explore natbib on your own - an identical example is provided in the natbib tab below.

When using Overleaf, we just need to make sure that the bibliography file is present in the project and properly referenced in our document. Check to make sure that your main.tex file is in the same directory as your sample-references.bib file.

At the top of our main.tex file, we’ll add a line to import biblatex:

LATEX

\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{sample-references.bib}

Do not forget to write the suffix of your referencing file, too (.bib).

Then, at the bottom of your main.tex file, add the following lines:

LATEX

\printbibliography

And… nothing? Right, because we haven’t cited anything in our document yet. Let’s add a citation:

LATEX

\section{Reference Databases}

One of the best features of LaTeX when writing academic documents is the ability to easily and
confidently \kw{cite references}.

We can cite the article by Thomas (e.g. with `\textbackslash autocite\{Thomas2008\}`) and it will show up in the references.

You should see that the citation appears in the text (`(Thomas et al. 2008)`), and the reference
now appears at the end of the document. \cmd{\textbackslash autocite} is a command that automatically chooses the
citation style for you.

Some additional commands that are available in  `biblatex`:

\begin{itemize}
    \item `\textbackslash cite\{key\}` or `\textbackslash cite\{key1, key2\}`: Cite the reference with the given key
    \item `\textbackslash cites\{key1\}\{key2\}\{key-n\}`: Cite multiple references.
    \item `\textbackslash usepackage\{\}\textbackslash parentcite\{key\}`: Cite the parent reference of the given key.
    \item `\textbackslash autocite\{key\}`: Automatically choose the citation style.
    \item `\textbackslash smartcite\{key\}`: Automatically choose the citation style, but with more control.
    \item `\textbackslash footcite\{key\}`: Cite the reference in a footnote.
\end{itemize}

A plain citation looks like this \cite{Graham1995}, while multiple citations look like this
\cites{Graham1995}[see][p. 42]{Thomas2008}. We already used autocite, but we can also use the
similar smartcite \smartcite{Graham1995}. The benefit with smartcite is that you
can setup that e.g. all references should go into a footnote. You can continue
using smartcite when you are *in* a footnote and it will then detect that there
is no need for creating another footnote but behaving like autocite.

If you want to have all entries of your referencing file in your bibliography, you can either go with \cite{key1,key2,.....} for all entries or you type \cite{*}. This will print all entries first in your text section and puts them into the bibliography. You can also go with \nocite{*} then the reference is only internally called and put into the bibliography.

It is always good to tidy up your .bib-file and use the fields accordingly. In case you want to omit certain fields in your bibliography you can do so on the fly:

LATEX

\AtEveryBibitem{
  \clearfield{url}
  \clearfield{month}
  \clearfield{note}
  \clearfield{isbn}
  \clearname{translator}
  \clearlist{language}
}

With this command you will delete the content of the fields in the bibliography. Note, that there is \clear*field*, \clear*name* and \clear*list*.

At the top of our main.tex file, we’ll add a line to import natbib:

LATEX

\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

Then, at the bottom of your main.tex file, add the following lines:

LATEX

\bibliography{sample-references}

And… nothing? Right, because we haven’t cited anything in our document yet. Let’s add a citation:

LATEX

\section{Reference Databases}

One of the best features of LaTeX when writing academic documents is the ability to easily and
confidently \kw{cite references}.

We can cite the article by Thomas \citep{Thomas2008} and it will show up in the references.

You should see that the citation appears in the text ((Thomas et al. 2008)), and the reference now appears at the end of the document. \citep is a command that automatically chooses the citation style for you.

Let’s explore some of the other citation commands available in natbib:

\citet{key}: Cite the reference with the given key in a textual context.
\citep{key}: Cite the reference with the given key in a parenthetical context.
\citealt{key}: Cite the reference with the given key without any parentheses.
\citeauthor{key}: Cite the author of the reference.
\citeyear{key}: Cite the year of the reference.

LATEX

A plain citation looks like this \citep{Graham1995}, while multiple citations look like this
\citep{Graham1995,Thomas2008}. We already used \citep, but we can also use \citet{Graham1995}, which
gives us a textual citation, or \citealt{Thomas2008}, which gives us a citation without parentheses.

Callout

There are many different bibliography styles available, and you can find a list of them at CTAN. Check if one of those bibligraphy and citation styles meets your requirements. If you want to finetune an existing one we suggest to take a look at biblatex-ext.

Instructor Note

Inline instructor notes can help inform instructors of timing challenges associated with the lessons. They appear in the “Instructor View”

Challenges

Challenge 1: Try out the other example?

Go back up to the natbib tab and try out the example there. What differences do you notice?

Answer

The natbib package is a bit more manual than biblatex. You have to specify the bibliography style and the bibliography file separately, and the citation commands are a bit more manual. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gives you more control over the output. There’s no wrong answer, just personal preference.

Challenge 2: Add another reference, then delete it.

Try adding the following reference to your sample-references.bib file:

BIBTEX

@book{Huff1954,
  author    = {Huff, Darrell},
  title     = {How to Lie with Statistics},
  publisher = {W. W. Norton \& Company},
  year      = {1954},
}

Then, add a citation to this reference in your document. Try a couple different styles of citation commands. Then, once you have it working, delete the reference and re-compile your document. What happens?

Show me the solution

You might expect removing the reference to either error or remove the citation from the text, but it doesn’t - instead we get a placeholder in the text and a warning in the log. A missing reference is not so critical an error that we can’t render the document, but we should probably fix it.

Challenge 3: What’s wrong with this?

We have the following reference in our document:

BIBTEX

@misc{mikolov2013,
      title={Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space},
      author={Tomas Mikolov and Kai Chen and Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean},
      year={2013},
      eprint={1301.3781},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781},
}

We are using biblatex to manage our references, and we identify this reference in the text like this:

LATEX

The Word2Vec algorithm \autocite{mikolov} is a popular method for generating word embeddings.

When we compile our document, we see the following error:

OUTPUT

The Word2Vec algorithm (mikolov) is a popular method for generating word embeddings.

What’s wrong with this reference? How can we fix it?

Show me the solution

We are referencing the key mikolov in our document, but the key in our BiBTeX file is mikolov2013. We need to update our citation command to \autocite{mikolov2013}. Note that LaTeX still compiles the document, but it gives us a warning that the reference is missing and uses the key as a placeholder. You might use this to temporarily mark a reference that you haven’t added yet, just be sure to clear all of your warnings before finializing your document.

Key Points

References are stored in a reference database, seperate from the LaTeX document.
BiBTeX files are used to store references in a processing-friendly format and have the extension .bib.
There are multiple libraries available to manage references in LaTeX documents, including natbib and biblatex.
We can use the \cite command or one of its variants to cite references in our document.

Content from Structuring Sources

Last updated on 2025-05-06 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can we make it easier to manage large LaTeX projects?
How can we reuse parts of our LaTeX document in other documents?
How can we structure our LaTeX project?

Objectives

Learn how to use commands to include other files in your LaTeX document
Restructure a LaTeX project to use multiple files

Project Structure

So far, we’ve been putting all of our LaTeX code into a single document. This is fine for small projects, but even with what we have here so far, you might have started to feel like things are getting a little unwieldy and hard to manage.

One of the great things we can do with LaTeX is break our document up into smaller “sources”, which allows us to work on each part of the document separately. You can imagine this might be helpful when working on a large document with multiple chapters, where each chapter is a separate file. You might also find this useful when you intend to reuse parts of your document in other documents, like title pages, tables of contents, or lists of figures.

This also helps with collaboration, as multiple people can work on different parts of the document at the same time without having to worry about conflicts.

Commands

There are two important commands to know when working with multiple sources:

\input{filename}
\include{filename}

The \input{filename} command will include the contents of the file filename.tex at the point where the command is called as though it was typed directly into the main document. This can be useful for things that are not, for example, separate chapters, but rather things like a title page, a table of contents, or a list of figures.

The \include{filename} command will do the same thing, but it will also start a new page before including the file. This is useful for including separate chapters or sections of your document. When you use \include{filename} you can also use \includeonly{filename1,filename2} in your preamble. This will then only insert the file mentioned but respect all other files regarding e.g. pagenumber, references etc.

Input Example

Let’s try out using the \input{filename} command. We’ll create a new file called input_example.tex in our project directory with the following contents:

LATEX

\cmd{Input} is useful for including things as if they were typed directly into the main document.
Things like commands don't have to be defined in the included file, as long as they are defined in
the main document.

Then, in our main.tex document, let’s add the following section:

LATEX

\section{Project Structure}

\subsection{Input}

\input{input_example}

When we compile our document, we should see the contents of input_example.tex included in our main document.

Include Example

Let’s try out using the \include{filename} command. We’ll create a new file called include_example.tex in our project directory with the following contents:

LATEX

\cmd{Include} is useful for including things as if they were typed directly into the main document,
but it will also start a new page before including the file.

Then, in our main.tex document, let’s add the following section:

LATEX

\subsection{Include}

\include{include_example}

When we compile our document, we should see the contents of include_example.tex, however this time the content will have included a new page before the content.

Callout

Another important thing to note about the \include{filename} command is that it cannot contain another \include{} command - this will result in an error.

You can, however, use \input{} inside an \include{} command or an \input{} command inside another \input{} command.

Updating Our Project

Now that we’ve seen how to use the \input{filename} and \include{filename} commands, let’s refactor our project to use them. We’ll take each section and put it in it’s own file, then include the files in our main.tex document. This will main our main document easier to read and manage, while separating out the content into more manageable pieces.

Let’s also organize our files a little bit. Instead of putting everything in the “root” directory of this project, we’ll create a folder called “content” and put our section files in there.

Separating Our Sections

Let’s make files in our “content” directory for each of our sections:

content/sections.tex
content/lists.tex
content/graphics.tex
content/tables.tex
content/cross-references.tex
content/mathematics.tex
content/fonts-and-spacing.tex
content/reference-databases.tex

\section{Reference Databases}

One of the best features of LaTeX when writing academic documents is the ability to easily and
confidently \kw{cite references}.

We can cite the article by Thomas (e.g. with `\textbackslash autocite\{Thomas2008\}`) and it will show up in the references.

You should see that the citation appears in the text (`(Thomas et al. 2008)`), and the reference
now appears at the end of the document. \cmd{\textbackslash autocite} is a command that automatically chooses the
citation style for you.

Some additional commands that are available in  `biblatex`:

\begin{itemize}
    \item `\textbackslash cite\{key\}` or `\textbackslash cite\{key1, key2\}`: Cite the reference with the given key
    \item `\textbackslash cites\{key1\}\{key2\}\{key-n\}`: Cite multiple references.
    \item `\textbackslash usepackage\{\}\textbackslash parentcite\{key\}`: Cite the parent reference of the given key.
    \item `\textbackslash autocite\{key\}`: Automatically choose the citation style.
    \item `\textbackslash smartcite\{key\}`: Automatically choose the citation style, but with more control.
    \item `\textbackslash footcite\{key\}`: Cite the reference in a footnote.
\end{itemize}

A plain citation looks like this \cite{Graham1995}, while multiple citations look like this
\cites{Graham1995}[see][p. 42]{Thomas2008}. We already used autocite, but we can also use the
similar smartcite \smartcite{Graham1995}. The benefit with smartcite is that you
can setup that e.g. all references should go into a footnote. You can continue
using smartcite when you are *in* a footnote and it will then detect that there
is no need for creating another footnote but behaving like autocite.

Then, in our main.tex document, we’ll include each of these files using the \input{filename}:

LATEX

\include{content/sections}
\include{content/lists}
\include{content/graphics}
\include{content/tables}
\include{content/cross-references}
\include{content/mathematics}
\include{content/fonts-and-spacing}
\include{content/reference-databases}

Callout

Note that the \include{filename} command does not require the .tex extension. LaTeX will assume that the file is a .tex file if no extension is provided.

This is also true for someof the other commands we’ve seen, such as \includegraphics{}. It is personal preference whether you include the extension or not.

When we compile our document, we should see the same content as before, but now we can make changes in our content files, and the changes will be reflected in our main document.

Other Files

While we’re at it, let’s also create files for our packages, commands, and title page. We’ll also put these into their own directory called “preamble”:

preamble/packages.tex
preamble/custom-commands.tex
preamble/titlepage.tex

Show details

preamble/packages.tex

LATEX

\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[parfill]{parskip}
\usepackage{xcolor}

Show details

preamble/custom-commands.tex

LATEX

% Highlight Keywords using the \kw{} command
\newcommand{\kw}[1]{\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{#1}}}
% Italicise LaTeX commands
\newcommand{\cmd}[1]{\textit{#1}}

Show details

preamble/titlepage.tex

LATEX

\begin{titlepage}
    \centering

    \huge
    \textbf{My Example Document}

    \vspace{1cm}
    \normalsize
    \textit{An example of a LaTeX document}

    \vfill
    January 1, 2000
\end{titlepage}

Our New main.tex

Our main.tex document should now look like this:

LATEX

% This command tells LaTeX what kind of document we are creating (article).
\documentclass{article}

\input{preamble/packages}

\input{preamble/custom-commands}

\addbibresource{sample-references.bib}

% Everything before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble.
\begin{document} % The document body starts here

\include{content/titlepage}

Hello World!

This is my first \kw{LaTeX} document.

\include{content/sections}
\include{content/lists}
\include{content/graphics}
\include{content/tables}
\include{content/cross-references}
\include{content/mathematics}
\include{content/fonts-and-spacing}
\include{content/reference-databases}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Callout

Note that we still need to put the content in the appropriate order. For example, you can’t add \input{includes/packages} at the end of the document, as it needs to be included before the document starts.

Challenges

Challenge 1: Refactor Your Document with Multiple Files

Refactor the following LaTeX document to use multiple files.

LATEX

% This is the main document: main.tex

\documentclass{article}


\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
    \centering
    \huge
    \textbf{My Custom LaTeX Title Page}

    \vspace{1cm} % Space between title and subtitle
    \normalsize
    \textit{A Sample Document with Custom Formatting}

    \vfill % Fill remaining space
    \large
    January 1, 2025
\end{titlepage}


\section{Tables}

\begin{tabular}{lll}
  Fruit  & Quantity & Price \\
  Apple  & 5        & 1.50  \\
  Banana & 6        & 2.00  \\
  Orange & 4        & 1.20  \\
\end{tabular}

\section{Graphics}

\begin{figure}[ht]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[height=2cm]{example-image.PNG}
  \caption{This is a caption for our image.}
\end{figure}


\end{document}

Separate the content into different files for the sections by tables.tex and graphics.tex.
Organize the file for the titlepage in a folder named “includes” and name the file titlepage.tex.
Organize the files for tables and graphics in a folder named “content”.
Use the \input command to include the titlepage and the content in your main.tex document.

Output

LATEX

% This is the main document: main.tex

\documentclass{article}


\begin{document}

% Include title page
\input{includes/titlepage}

% Include content from different files in the "content" folder
\input{content/sections}
\input{content/lists}
\input{content/graphics}
\input{content/tables}
\input{content/cross-references}
\input{content/math}
\input{content/text-and-spacing}

\end{document}

Challenge 2: Why did we do this?

In our content/tables.tex file, we have a bunch of \input{} commands for the tables instead of writing the tables directly in the file. Why did we do this? What is the benefit of doing this?

Show me the solution

Using an \input command inserts the table contents directly into the document as though it was typed, which means that we can reuse the same table in multiple documents without having to copy paste it. For example, if we were making a presentation in LaTeX, we could use the same table in our presentation. This means that if we make a change to the table, it will be reflected in all of the documents in which we use it.

(This reflects the programming principle of “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY)!)

Challenge 3: Restructuring a larger document?

Let’s make a new project called “structuring-sources”. Add the following files to your project:

main.tex (copy the contents from this file)
references.bib (copy the contents from this file)

How might we use \input{} and \include{} to break our project up into smaller files?

Output

There isn’t a specific correct answer for this challenge, but one idea might be something that looks like this:

├── main.tex
├── preamble.tex
├── refereces.bib
├── content/
│   ├── introduction.tex
│   ├── model_architecture.tex
│   ├── model_results.tex
│   └── conclusion.tex
├── tables/
    └── model_results.tex

Key Points

LaTeX projects can contain many files that reference each other
The \input{filename} and \include{filename} commands allow you to include the contents of other files in your document
The \frontmatter, \mainmatter, \backmatter, and \appendix commands help structure your document

Content from Fonts and Encodings

Last updated on 2025-05-06 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do you write a lesson using R Markdown and sandpaper?

Objectives

Explain how to use markdown with the new lesson template
Demonstrate how to include pieces of code, figures, and nested challenge blocks

documentclass Parameters

In an earlier episode we learned that we can change the font size of the entire document by changing the \documentclass command. For example, we can change the font size to 12pt by using:

LATEX

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

But we can add other parameters to this command to change the overall layout of the document. For example, we can set the size of the document to A4 paper by using:

LATEX

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

We can also change the entire document to a two-column layout by using:

LATEX

\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}

And we can of course combine these options:

LATEX

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt,twocolumn]{article}

Fonts

We saw earlier that we can create commands of our own in LaTeX, but there is also a renewcommand command that let’s us change the definition of an existing command. This might be useful if you want the definition of a command to change throughout the document, however there are also some commands that are pre-defined that we can modify with this command.

For Example, we can change the font of the entire document by adding the following line to the preamble/custom-commands.tex file:

LATEX

% Change the font of the entire document to a monospace font
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\ttdefault}

When you compile the document you should see something like this:

IMAGE GOES HERE

More Fonts

Unfortunately, the default LaTeX installation does not come with many fonts. However, there are additional packages that you can include if you are looking for a specific font. Let’s try making our document look like it’s using the Times New Roman font. To do this, all we need to do is add the following import to the preamble/packages.tex file:

LATEX

\usepackage{tgtermes}

Callout

You can find a large selection of fonts at The LaTeX Font Catalogue, complete with examples of how to use them in your document.

Challenges

Challenge 1:

We saw how to change the font of the entire document using the \renewcommand command. But what if only want a specific section of the document to be in a different font? What would we have to modify in the following code to make the text in the first \section{} command use a different font?

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tgtermes}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\texttt{
\section{My Section}
\lipsum[1]
}


\section{My Other Section}
\lipsum[2]

\end{document}

Show me the solution

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tgtermes}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\section{My Section}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\ttdefault}
\lipsum[1]

\section{My Other Section}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\rmdefault}
\lipsum[2]

\end{document}

Challenge 2:

Show me the solution

Key Points

Use .md files for episodes when you want static content
Use .Rmd files for episodes when you need to generate output
Run sandpaper::check_lesson() to identify any issues with your lesson
Run sandpaper::build_lesson() to preview your lesson locally

Content from Error Handling

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

What do I do when I get an error message?

Objectives

Understand how to interpret error messages in LaTeX
Learn how to fix common errors in LaTeX documents

Error Handling

Error messages in LaTeX can often be difficult to understand, especially if you’re new to the language. However there are a few common errors that we can learn to recognize and fix, and a few techniques we can use to debug our documents based on the error messages we receive.

Anatomy of an Error Message

Way back in Episode 2 - Document Structure, we saw some error messages - let’s take a closer look at one of them and see what it tells us.

Let’s re-introduce the issue: we’ll change the \documentclass command in main.tex to \documnetclass…

Ok, that’s a lot of errors! Let’s look at the very first one in the list:

In the red bar at the top, we have both the name of the error message (“Unidentified control sequence”) and the file and line number where the error occurred (main.tex, 2). This gives us a great starting point to identify the issue. Now let’s look at the contents of the message:

The compiler is having trouble understanding a command you have used. Check that the command is
spelled correctly. If the command is part of a package, make sure you have included the package in
your preamble using \usepackage{...}.

This is Overleaf’s way of trying to make a more helpful version of the error message than LaTeX itself. We can see the actual error message from LaTeX just below:

l.2 \documnetclass
                  {article}
The control sequence at the end of the top line
of your error message was never \def'ed. If you have
misspelled it (e.g., `\hobx'), type `I' and the correct
spelling (e.g., `I\hbox'). Otherwise just continue,
and I'll forget about whatever was undefined.

Of course, we know what the error was, so we can just fix it by changing \documnetclass back to \documentclass.

Callout

In general, the first error message in the list is the most useful one to look at. The other error messages are often just a result of the first error cascading down the document, so fixing the first one will often fix the rest of them too.

Errors vs Warnings vs Information

Not all messages are equal! LaTeX has three different types of messages:

Error: This is a serious issue that will prevent your document from compiling. You need to fix this before you can continue.
Warning: This is a less serious issue that may not prevent your document from compiling, but it may cause issues with the output. You should still try to fix this, but it may not be critical.
Information: This is just a message that provides additional information about the document. You can usually ignore this.

In Overleaf, error messages are shown in red, warnings are shown in yellow, and information messages in blue.

Fixing a Common Error

This time, instead of introducing an error into our document, let’s create a new file called my-error-example.tex and add the following code:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}

Hello there!

This document intentionally contains a very common latex error in the following section. Use the
error message to try to identify and fix the error.

\section{A section with an error}
\label{sec:error}

As mentioned in section \ref{sec:intro}, this document contains an error.

We have a list of items in our store:

\begin{itemize}
  \item Camera
  \item Printer (out of stock)
  \item Cellphone
\end

Our Current Inventory:

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
  \hline
  Item & Quantity \\
  \hline
  Camera & 5 \\
  Printer & 0 \\
  Cellphone & 10 \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}

\end{document}

Challenges

Challenge 1: Identify the error

Take a look at the following LaTeX excerpt:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

My Amazing Content: $\alpha = \fraction{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}$

\end{document}

Attempting to compile this document results in the following error message:

! Undefined control sequence.
l.4 $\alpha = \fraction
                       {1}{(1 - \beta)^2}$
The control sequence at the end of the top line
of your error message was never \def'ed. If you have
misspelled it (e.g., `\hobx'), type `I' and the correct
spelling (e.g., `I\hbox'). Otherwise just continue,
and I'll forget about whatever was undefined.

Without running the code, can you identify the issue?

Show me the solution

The error message indicates that the command \fraction is not defined. The correct command should be \frac.

Challenge 2: Identify the error

Here’s another LaTeX excerpt:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{booktab}

\begin{document}

More Amazing Content!

\end{document}

The following error message appears when you try to compile this document:

! LaTeX Error: File `booktab.sty' not found.

Type X to quit or <RETURN> to proceed,
or enter new name. (Default extension: sty)

Why is this error occurring? What is the solution?

Show me the solution

The error message indicates that the package booktab is not found. The correct package name should be booktabs

Challenge 3: Why do I get this warning?

The following code generates a warning message:

LATEX

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}

\section{Adding a rotated image}

We can rotate an image by setting the "angle" parameter:

\includegraphics[scale=2, angle=45]{figures/example-image.png}
\end{document}

The text of the warning message is:

Overfull \hbox (390.7431pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 10--11
[][]
 []

[1

{/usr/local/texlive/2024/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}]
Overfull \vbox (170.7431pt too high) has occurred while \output is active []

[2 <./figures/example-image.png>] (./output.aux)

The document compiles successfully, but the warning message won’t go away. Why is this happening? How can you fix it?

Show me the solution

The message is indicating that the image is too wide for the page, which is causing an “overfull hbox” (overfull horizontal box) error. This is a common issue when including images in LaTeX. The warning will not prevent the document from compiling, but it may point to something we should take a look at, in this case, an image that flows off the page.

Key Points

Use .md files for episodes when you want static content
Use .Rmd files for episodes when you need to generate output
Run sandpaper::check_lesson() to identify any issues with your lesson
Run sandpaper::build_lesson() to preview your lesson locally

Content from Documentation and Finding Help

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

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?

Show me the solution

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}

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?

Show me the solution

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

Content from Loading and Manipulating Data

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

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

How do you write a lesson using R Markdown and sandpaper?

Objectives

Explain how to use markdown with the new lesson template
Demonstrate how to include pieces of code, figures, and nested challenge blocks

Introduction

This is a lesson created via The Carpentries Workbench. It is written in Pandoc-flavored Markdown for static files (with extension .md) and R Markdown for dynamic files that can render code into output (with extension .Rmd). Please refer to the Introduction to The Carpentries Workbench for full documentation.

What you need to know is that there are three sections required for a valid Carpentries lesson template:

questions are displayed at the beginning of the episode to prime the learner for the content.
objectives are the learning objectives for an episode displayed with the questions.
keypoints are displayed at the end of the episode to reinforce the objectives.

Instructor Note

Inline instructor notes can help inform instructors of timing challenges associated with the lessons. They appear in the “Instructor View”

Challenge 1: Can you do it?

What is the output of this command?

R

paste("This", "new", "lesson", "looks", "good")

Output

OUTPUT

[1] "This new lesson looks good"

Challenge 2: how do you nest solutions within challenge blocks?

Show me the solution

You can add a line with at least three colons and a solution tag.

Figures

You can use pandoc markdown for static figures with the following syntax:

![optional caption that appears below the figure](figure url){alt='alt text for accessibility purposes'}

You belong in The Carpentries!

Math

One of our episodes contains $\LaTeX$ equations when describing how to create dynamic reports with {knitr}, so we now use mathjax to describe this:

$\alpha = \dfrac{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}$ becomes: $\alpha = \dfrac{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}$

Cool, right?

Key Points

Use .md files for episodes when you want static content
Use .Rmd files for episodes when you need to generate output
Run sandpaper::check_lesson() to identify any issues with your lesson
Run sandpaper::build_lesson() to preview your lesson locally

Overview

Questions

Objectives

What is LaTeX

Our first Overleaf Project

The Overleaf Interface

The Main Menu

Instructor Note

Challenge 1: Create a new project, then delete it

Answer

Challenge 2: Copy your current project, then delete it

Answer

Challenge 3: Three ways to download your project as pdf

Answer

Key Points

Overview

Questions

Objectives

Editing the Document

LATEX

Callout

Looking at our document

Callout

Comments

LATEX

Rendering the Document

Callout

Paragraphs

Special Characters

Show details

Callout

LATEX

Errors, Warnings and the Log

Fixing Errors

Callout

Challenges

Challenge 1: What’s wrong with this document?

LATEX

Answer

Challenge 2: Displaying Special characters.

Answer

LATEX

Challenge 3: Paragraphs with \par.

LATEX

Answer

Challenge 4: One line of code with paragraphs and special characters.

Answer

LATEX

Key Points

Show details

LATEX

Overview

Questions

Objectives

Sections

LATEX

Callout

Lists

LATEX

Callout

LATEX

LATEX

Challenges

Challenge 1: What needs to change?

LATEX

Answer

LATEX

Challenge 2: Can you do it?

Answer

LATEX

Challenge 3: Enumerate your list manually

Answer

LATEX

Key Points

Show details

Overview

Questions

Objectives

What is a Document Class?

Callout

Challenge 3: Paragraphs with `\par`.