Last Updated on December 24, 2022
LaTeX is a professional document preparation system and document markup language written by Leslie Lamport. It’s a very mature system with development starting more than 30 years ago.
LaTeX is widely used in the publication of scientific documents in many disciplines, such as mathematics, statistics, physics, economics, political science. It helps an author produce professional looking documents, papers, and books that are perfectly typeset. The formatted works are consistent, accurate, and reusable. It’s particularly suited to the production of long articles and books, as it has facilities for the automatic numbering of chapters, sections, theorems, equations etc., and also has facilities for cross-referencing. LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG system.
LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting its output. LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX that aims to help the user concentrate on the content, rather than the formatting.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn LaTeX. If you’re looking for free LaTeX programming books, check here.
1. LaTeX Tutorials: A Primer by Indian TeX Users Group by Indian TeX Users Group
Packed with fully explained examples, LaTeX Tutorials: A Primer is a hands-on introduction quickly leading a novice user to professional-quality results. It’s published by the Indian TeX Users Group.
If you are about to write mathematical or scientific papers, seminar handouts, or even plan to write a thesis, this book offers you a fast-paced and practical introduction. Particularly during studying in school and university you’ll benefit enormously, as a mathematician or physicist as well as an engineer or a humanist.
Contents of the book:
- The Basics – what is LaTeX, simple typesetting, fonts.
- The Document – describes how an entire document with chapters and sections can be produced.
- Bibliography – the BibTeX program is examined.
- Bibliographic Databases – the reader is shown how to create a bibliographic database.
- Table of contents, Index and Glossary.
- Displayed Text – shows the reader various constructs for displaying text depending on the nature of the displayed text.
- Rows and Columns – keeping tabs, and tables are examined.
- Typesetting Mathematics – including custom commands, new operators, and symbols.
- Typesetting Theorems – using the declaration \newtheorem.
- Several Kinds of Boxes – LR boxes, Par, Rule.
- Floats – a good tutorial on the thorny problem of figures.
- Cross References in LATEX.
- Footnotes, Marginpars, and Endnotes.
2. LaTeX for Beginners by IS
This is an absolute beginners guide to writing documents in LATEX using TeXworks. It assumes no prior knowledge of LATEX, or any other computing language.
3. Getting to Grips with LaTeX by Andrew Roberts
A collection of 12 useful tutorials.
4. The very short guide to typesetting with LaTeX by Silmaril Consultants
This is a 4 page guide covering the basics of the language.
5. A Beginner’s Guide to LaTeX by David Xiao
This document is for people who have never used LaTeX before and just want a quick crash course to get started. It’s a mere 6 pages in length.
All tutorials in this series:
| Free Programming Tutorials | |
|---|---|
| ABAP | Advanced Business Application Programming |
| Ada | ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and others |
| Agda | Dependently typed functional language based on intuitionistic type theory |
| Alice | Educational language with an integrated development environment |
| Arduino | Inexpensive, flexible, open source microcontroller platform |
| Assembly | As close to writing machine code without writing in pure hexadecimal |
| Awk | Versatile language designed for pattern scanning and processing |
| Bash | ‘Bourne-Again-SHell’ is both a shell and programming language |
| BASIC | Family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages |
| C | General-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level language |
| C++ | General-purpose, portable, free-form, multi-paradigm language |
| C# | Combines the power and flexibility of C++ with the simplicity of Visual Basic |
| Chapel | Parallel-programming language in development at Cray Inc. |
| Clojure | Dialect of the Lisp programming language |
| ClojureScript | Compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript |
| COBOL | Common Business-Oriented Language |
| CoffeeScript | A very succinct programming language that transcompiles into JavaScript |
| Coq | Dependently typed language similar to Agda, Idris, F*, Lean, and others |
| Crystal | General-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented language |
| CSS | CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specifies a web page’s appearance |
| D | General-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax |
| Dart | Client-optimized programming language for fast apps |
| Dylan | Multi-paradigm language, supports functional & object-oriented programming |
| ECMAScript | Best known as the language embedded in web browsers |
| Eiffel | Object-oriented language |
| Elixir | Relatively new functional language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine |
| Elm | Functional language that compiles to JavaScript |
| Emacs Lisp | A dialect of the Lisp programming language. |
| Erlang | General-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional language |
| F# | General purpose, strongly typed, multi-paradigm language. Part of ML |
| Factor | Dynamic stack-based language |
| Forth | Imperative stack-based programming language |
| Fortran | The first high-level language, using the first compiler |
| GDScript | Godot’s built-in language for scripting and interacting with nodes |
| Go | Compiled, statically typed programming language |
| Groovy | Powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language |
| Hack | For the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), created as a dialect of PHP |
| Haml | HTML Abstraction Markup Language |
| Haskell | Standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language |
| Icon | High-level, general-purpose language |
| Imba | Full-stack language that compiles to performant JavaScript |
| J | Array programming language based primarily on APL |
| Java | General-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level language |
| JavaScript | Interpreted, prototype-based, scripting language |
| Julia | High-level, high-performance language for technical computing |
| Kotlin | Statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference |
| LabVIEW | Designed to enable domain experts to build power systems quickly |
| LaTeX | Professional document preparation system and document markup language |
| Less | Backwards-compatible language extension for Cascading Style Sheets |
| Limbo | Designed for applications running distributed systems on small computers |
| Lisp | Unique features - excellent to study programming constructs |
| Logo | Dialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility |
| Lua | Designed as an embeddable scripting language |
| Markdown | Plain text formatting syntax designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write |
| MoonScript | Dynamic scripting programmer friendly language that compiles into Lua |
| Nim | Statically typed compiled systems language with syntax resembling Python |
| Objective-C | General purpose language which is a superset of C |
| OCaml | General-purpose, powerful, high-level language |
| Octave | High-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations |
| OpenCL | Open Computing Language |
| Pascal | Imperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s |
| Perl | High-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language |
| Pike | Interpreted, general-purpose, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic language |
| PHP | PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years |
| Pony | Pony is an actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance language |
| PostScript | Page description language in electronic and desktop publishing |
| Prolog | General purpose, declarative, logic programming language |
| PureScript | Small strongly, statically typed language with expressive types |
| Python | General-purpose, structured, powerful language |
| QML | Hierarchical declarative language for user interface layout with a syntax to JSON |
| R | De facto standard among statisticians and data analysts |
| Racket | Platform for programming language design and implementation |
| Raku | Member of the Perl family of programming languages |
| Roff | Extensible text formatting language and a set of programs for printing |
| Ruby | General purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented language |
| Rust | Ideal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code |
| Scala | Modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based language |
| Scheme | General-purpose, functional, language descended from Lisp and Algol |
| Scratch | Visual programming language designed for 8-16 year-old children |
| Solidity | Object-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts |
| SQL | Access and manipulate data held in a relational database management system |
| Standard ML | One of the two main dialects of the ML language |
| Swift | Powerful and intuitive general-purpose programming language |
| Tcl | Dynamic language based on concepts of Lisp, C, and Unix shells |
| TypeScript | Strict syntactical superset of JavaScript, adding optional static typing |
| V | Statically typed compiled language to build maintainable software |
| Vala | Object-oriented language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code |
| VHDL | Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language |
| VimL | Powerful scripting language of the Vim editor |
| XML | Set of rules for defining semantic tags that describe the structure and meaning |
| Zig | General-purpose programming language and toolchain |