Roughly speaking, LaTeX is a programming language in the same way that.html is a programming language. Both are used to organize content in an appealing fashion when compiled. While.html is used for websites, LaTeX is generally used for academic documents.

While LaTeX's ability to quickly format math equations is a major reason for this, the language can also be used to publish books, presentations, and even write a program to pilot a Mars Rover (though not recommended).

A team of Informatics students at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI for short) have been tasked to assemble a beginner's guide to LaTeX in the form of a website. We hope our work proves useful to you!

To give Word and its contemporaries due credit, they does look less scary than LaTeX (at first). These applications are designed to be easily interactible on the graphical level; all that's needed to make a table bigger is a click and drag of the table corner. This is a design paradigm referred to as WYSIWYG.

By and large, these programs start breaking down when your document gets large. Word, for example, starts slowing down and crashing as your report accumulates more equations, figures, and images. LaTeX avoids this problem entirely by handling only the code, and producing an output (compiling) separately. Other significant advantages include:

1. Ease of reformatting.
   • LaTeX's default style is already easy to read, and future modification takes a fraction of the time that it would take in Word or elsewhere. Font sizes are relative, new sections can be made to always start on a new page, image resizing and placement is generally "auto-corrected" by the compiler (it has good judgment)... the list goes on.
2. Bibliographical management.
   • Given the usual attributes for a source citation, e.g. author, year published, date of access, etc.), LaTeX has a package that instantly produces a bibliography in MLA, APA, or other specified style. Check out our guide here.
3. Fantastic equation editing.
   • Rather than using default text to typset an equation, LaTeX can produce beautiful equations, matrices, 2D & 3D graphs, all without slowing down your computer (ahem, Microsoft Equation Editor). Check out another homecooked guide of ours here.
4. Modularity.
   • If there is a need for it, there's almost certainly a LaTeX extension (called a package) already created for it. Check out some of our favorites here.
5. Did I mention it's free?

Step one: Breathe! This is totally doable.

Step two: Use our guide! This website is built to be accessible to a typical Bachelors student, and the website sections build on one another nicely. Start at the installation guide to determine how to get LaTeX running on your computer shortly, begin with our basic syntax section, and proceed from there. Skimming through our whole website to get to the sections most necessary for you takes 30 minutes at most, with maybe an equal amount of time needed to copy, paste, and modify our example code. :-)

For those that learn better by following along a video, we recommend Michelle Krummel's tutorial on How to Format a Math Paper on YouTube, at just under 25 minutes.

:-)