$\mathrm{L}\mathrm{A}\mathrm{T}\mathrm{E}\mathrm{X}$ course 2024

Course objective

This is a series of five talks introducing the LaTeX document preparation system.

As a student or researcher in any of the natural sciences, really, you will probably sooner or later have to prepare a report, a thesis, a paper or even a book. LaTeX is very well suited for this task through its approach of structuring a document logically, making stylising very easy, through its programmability and portability and, last but not least, through its superb support for typography and mathematical typesetting. In the mathematical community at least, LaTeX is the de facto standard and even required by many publishing houses and journals.

The goal is to introduce LaTeX in a series of five talks that cover progressively more advanced topics, starting from the total beginner up to live TeX-ing during the lecture.

Reflection

Thanks to everyone who attended some of the talks; I had fun teaching you something about LaTeX and hope that you can gain something from this.

Every now and then, I will probably update some parts through suggestions of others or I will add some content since I forgot to cover them during the talks. Checkout the PDF slides every now and then.

Most of you have probably noticed that the content was quite excessive. The number of attendants dropped over the course and the attention span during each talk also dropped rapidly. Personally for me, I also noticed that I was simply too ambitious. Preparing these talks took much longer than expected. If I should redo this course next year, then I will definitely only cover the first 2 1/2 talks in a timespan of five days and make it much more interactive. Sorry about that.

Organisational information

When? 2nd – 6th April 2024, 10 a.m. s.t. – 12 a.m. (meaning 10 o'clock sharp for probably two hours). If the audience desires a break, I will happily follow. After that, I will stay for some time (up to an hour or so) for questions, amongst others.

Where? Wegelerstraße 10, 53115 Bonn, University of Bonn. Near the Physics Department in the 'Großer Hörsaal': if you enter the building, go up the first set of stairs and then turn right; you should enter a very big lecture hall (around 250 seats large).

For whom? Anyone who is interested in learning LaTeX. Primarily intended for bachelor and master students of the Department of Mathematics. As of now, the students from the Department of Computer Science are welcome (the size of the lecture hall should not be a problem).

How? In English. The format will be a classic presentation with slides, which will be uploaded here and should serve as a reference, together with its code for the interested. During the talks, I will sprinkle some quick exercises for the attendants, and there will be some practical daily homework. Questions during the talks are very welcome. However, the talks will not be streamed online (I don't get paid enough for this).

What? An introduction to LaTeX, basically from zero to hero. Topics included:

• A bit of history and the rationale of LaTeX.
• Basic commands for typing a document.
• Extensive explanation on typing mathematics, including tikz-cd for commutative diagrams and diffcoef for derivatives. Other packages for other areas of mathematics can be requested: I will consider covering them.
• Basic usage of BibLaTeX for bibliographies, indexing, creating drawings and diagrams in TikZ.
• Debugging some of the common compiler errors.
• Writing pseudo code or programs in other languages (this is for you, computer scientists).
• Hacking and programming LaTeX.
• Customising page layouts.
• Some typography here and there.
• Pro level: live TeX-ing during the lecture. Maybe a good example on how to use Neovim.

Questions

Who are you?

I'm Tien from the Department of Mathematics, currently a bachelor student. I would describe myself as a LaTeX enthusiast and use LaTeX probably since ninth grade. Currently, I write almost everything related to my studies in LaTeX, even typing my lecture notes live during the lecture.

You might know me as the author of some of the lecture notes I created. The lecture notes were published for:

• Analysis II in summer term 2022, held by Prof. Dr. Sturm.
• Algebra I in summer term 2023, held by Dr. Mihatsch.
• Einführung in die Algebra in winter term 2023/24, held by Prof. Dr. Huybrechts (these notes were not endorsed by the lecturer).
• I once publicly uploaded all my lecture notes from my first semester (now private).
• I give access to my private lecture notes to close friends and acquaintances.

The first two should still be online on eCampus, if you want to get an impression. (Style-wise, I only did the coloured boxes as it was requested by some students and many probably liked this; I personally am not a fan.)

I'm interested in the content of this course, but do I really need to physically come to the talks?

No, you don't have to.

In fact, probably everything important that I will say can be found on the slides (regarding live TeX-ing, I'm not so sure). If you think that it suffices to go through these slides alone, then I don't want to waste your time.

However, you will miss out on the following:

• Experiencing me as a person (I actually don't know what I mean by that).
• The possibility to ask questions, either on the course content or on related LaTeX topics.
• Me helping you on various LaTeX problems (e.g. installation of a LaTeX distribution, how to solve certain bugs, ideas on how to implement certain things) after each talk.

I only want to learn the bare minimum on LaTeX to survive/I'm only interested in the more advanced stuff. Do I really need to attend all talks?

Again: no, you don't have to, as I don't want to waste your time.

The content of the talks will be grouped by 'advanced-ness' or difficulty; feel free to visit the ones you find interesting. As of now, the plan for the talks are the following:

1. Talk 1: Introduction and typing text (novice).
2. Talk 2: Typing mathematics (novice).
3. Talk 3: Creating bibliographies, indices, drawing diagrams (advanced).
4. Talk 4: Customising layout and hacking LaTeX (expert).
5. Talk 5: Live TeX-ing (pro).

I strongly recommend for any beginner to attend talks 1 and 2. As for talk 3, it might be helpful (you never know), especially if you want to write a whole thesis.

Do I need to bring my device/laptop/tablet?

No, you don't have to.

However, I strongly recommend that you bring your laptop to the first talks so that I can help you install a LaTeX distribution (and probably others can help you too, e.g. since I have no clue about Apple's Mac OS). Make sure to also bring your charger as many modern CPUs can be overclocked while plugged in (from experience, the installation takes quite a while, especially on old laptops).

For the other talks, you can still bring your device to solve some of the homework or ask me anything LaTeX related.

Thank you for this course! I still have some questions/I need some tech (TeX) support. Can I contact you somehow and ask you for help?

Of course, I'm happy to help. You can write me an email at tien.nguyen@uni-bonn.de, write me a message (with code!) via Signal or find me in the 'Aufenthaltsraum' (student lounge) in the secondary building of the Mathematics Centre. Note however that I can only help you with problems within the ecosystems that I personally use. These are pdfLaTeX with the default document classes, some Neovim with VimTeX and Luasnip, as well as Windows and Manjaro (Arch-based systems). Everything outside of this, e.g. Mac OS, LuaLaTeX, XeTeX, ConTeXt, Emacs, KOMA-script, memoir, bibtex, etc., I probably cannot help you with.

Licensing

The parts of this project are licensed differently:

• the source code (including the physical PDF) is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (among others, this says that private usage is allowed),
• the content of the PDF slides is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (in particular, you should give credit to me),
• all code examples in the PDF slides are licensed under the CC0 1.0 (i.e. do whatever the hell you want with them).

Regarding the images:

• Kirby was taken from Wikipedia. All rights of the Kirby franchise belong to the respective owners/producers, most notably Nintendo Co., Ltd.
• All other pictures are my own work, and hence are licensed under the Apache License 2.0 as well.