Presentation about writing in LaTeX delivered for the Academic Writing Week at TELI

1. Academic Writing in LaTeX
Daniele Di Mitri
daniele.dimitri@ou.nl
TELI academic writing week 5-9th December 2016

2. How does it look?
Pagina 2

3. Why LaTeX?
Pagina 3

4. Short history
• In 1978 a famous computer scientist Donald Knuth
disappointed with the quality of his The Art of Programming
series invented a new typesetting system called Tex
• Around 10 years later, he released the first version of Tex,,
which gave extremely fine-grained control of document layout.
• By the mid-80s Leslie Lamport created a set of macros that
abstracted away many of the complexities, by for example
separating content and style in the document.
• This extension became LaTeX.
Onderwerp via >Beeld >Koptekst en voettekst
Pagina 4

5. How to pronounce LaTeX
• Knuth wrote in his book, TeX derives from
Greek τεχ (art, technology) and is usually
pronounced teck
• Lamport added that LaTeX can be
pronounced either as lah-teck or lay-teck
Onderwerp via >Beeld >Koptekst en voettekst
Pagina 5

6. Is LaTeX the right choice?
• YES if:
– You type a lot of equation
– You don't want to bother with formatting documents
• NO if:
– You want to control every graphical aspect of whole
document
– You need to exchange documents with non-LaTeX people
Pagina 6

7. How to use LaTeX?
Windows OS: TeX Live, MiKTeX
Editors: Texmaker, LEd
Mac OS: MacTeX*
Editors: TeXStudio*, TexShop
Pagina 7
LOCALLY REMOTELY
*personal preference
No installation requiredneed to install TeX Distribution & Editor
ShareLaTeX*
OverLeaf
collaborate like GDoc

8. Some definitions
• Command: starts with ‘’ e.g.
tableofcontent
• Argument: required for some
commands e.g. title{this is title}
• Environment: block of code between
begin{…} and end{…}
Pagina 8

9. Sectioning
Pagina 9

10. Figures & referencing
Pagina 10
begin{figure}[p]
centering
includegraphics[width=0.8textwidth]{chicken}
caption{Awesome chicken}
label{fig:chicken}
end{figure}
Fig. 1 Awesome chicken
Positioning command:
p=next-page, h=here, t=top, b=bottom
Filename of the figure
(without file extension)
To reference the chicken
just do ref{fig:chicken}

11. Tables
Pagina 11
|c|c|c| means 3 columns with centered content

12. Footnotes & Lists
Pagina 12
• To add a Footnote: footnote{write here}
• To add a bullet list:
begin{itemize}
item First point
item Second point
end{itemize}
• To add a numbered list:
begin{enumerate}
item First point
item Second point
end{enumerate}

13. Bibliography
Pagina 13
• The references go into a separate file with extension .bib
• References have this format:
@book{freire2000pedagogy,
title={Pedagogy of the oppressed},
author={Freire, Paulo},
year={2000},
publisher={Bloomsbury Publishing}
}
• These snippets can be found on Google Scholar or Mendeley
(right click on the entry > Copy As > BibTeX entry)
• To cite this work simply do cite{freire2000pedagogy}
Citation key

14. Further info
Pagina 14
• To learn more about LaTeX http://www.sharelatex.com/learn
• Several anomalies normally happen with LaTeX, a common
place where to lookup for solutions is
http://tex.stackexchange.com/

15. Exercise time!
Pagina 15
• Go to https://www.sharelatex.com/templates
• Search for APA journal
• Open it in ShareLaTeX, register if you have to
• Your goal is to:
– Write an abstract
– Add a picture
– Add a table
– Add few references
• These slides are available at slideshare.net/dnldimitri/