This post was originally posted on my blog here.
LaTeX is a beautiful documentation system. It's similar to Markdown, but has many more features and is commonly used for academic papers and other publications that require a lot of equations. In this quick how to, we cover how to install LaTeX and use Visual Studio Code as an editor/previewer.
Installing LaTeX
I recommend downloading TeX Live for Windows/Linux, and MacTex for macOS.
Setting up our editor
If you haven't already, install Visual Studio Code and go through a tutorial. Then, we need to install our extension for LaTeX itself. Head over to LaTeX Workshop and click install.
Using LaTeX
Now that we have our editor setup, we can write our first project. All LaTeX documents have a (non-blank) file that ends with .tex, which is the "main" file that has all of the text of the document. Since LaTeX usually generates more files (such as .log, etc.) while building the document, it's recommended that every document you want to write has its own folder.
For starters, create a file named example.tex:
\documentclass{article}
% General document formatting
\usepackage[margin=0.7in]{geometry}
\usepackage[parfill]{parskip}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
% Put your text here
This is starter text.
\end{document}
Press Ctrl-Alt-B to build your project (or use the Command Palette), then Ctrl-Alt-T to view the pdf in a new tab. The end result should look like this:
Conclusion
LaTeX and VSCode are a great combination that you can use to write beautiful reports and papers. Check out a tutorial or two to realize the full experience LaTeX has to offer.
Edit: Fanny recommends another great tutorial as well.
Edit 2: Fixed a tutorial link.
Latest comments (19)
I've produced novels, poetry books and whatnot using LaTeX. It's quirky and strange, but it gets beautiful results. More people should try it!
It’s probably very powerful, but it won’t replace markdown. I use markdown very often in Sublime with highlighting to just structure some thoughts without ever generating a document from it. Markdown is just some formalized way to structure a text file like humans would do. Latex clearly is not something a human would write.
Now look at you basic example, it’s completely unreadable as source.
For more complex technical documentation I would still probably use Asciidoc.
Then, there are scientific papers. Actually when I did my masters thesis, I wanted to use Latex but I knew I had to use a lot of formulas, pictures and tables. The way to add those to a latex document was overly complex at that time and unreadable in source. So I read a couple of articles about how to handle large documents in Word (yes, I said it) without crashing it. Then I spent some time to create a Layout, styles and add fonts etc to resemble a document that looks like something that Latex would produce. At the end, I was much faster with the formula editor, inline Tables and graphics.
So I don’t think I would ever write Latex as primary source. Some WYSIWYG editor that generates Latex that I could change If I want to.
You can use LaTeX from a Docker container, so you don't have to install anything! It works like a charm…
I second that. Org-mode is great. I rarely use LaTeX, these days, but I use org-mode for many things, often exporting via LaTeX to PDF
If you do not use Latex often and need just to write one paper there are online tools available. I set it up on my machine because I write a lot, but I was trying out overleaf.com/ and it was a great experience because they have a lot of templates and git support. And no I do not get money to recommend them :D Just think it is a good place for beginners who have problems with the installation ;)
+1 Overleaf is great! I've recommended it to a few people as well.
I'm a fan of lyx, a WYSIWYM(What you see is what you mean) editor for latex.
I finally managed to write my reply to your article, thank you for the motivation
I've loved LaTeX since I first saw it. I've been advocating Pweave for literal programming in my team and trying to get them to use it for automated diagrams too. I'm now delving into the depths of style files to create a PDF that appeases the marketing department for platform to customer automation. I've got a couple of posts already written on diagrams in LaTeX and using other True Type fonts which I'll cross post to here.
Spread the \LaTeX \heartshape :)
Thanks a lot , i've used latex for 2 years now for my research paper and all my universities homework, it is a good and awesome tool, my favorite editor is texstudio the other thing i like about latex it is his community, the tex.stackexchange has already answers to any problems you can have with that editor
I also suggest online platforms like Sharelatex or Overleaf. They work really well and are also really easy to use.
You can also try Authorea if you're interested in web-friendly LaTeX with code snippets, data, etc.