Why LaTeX is a Must for Students?
My story with LaTeX
From the beginning of my college years, the only text editor that I used is either Microsoft Word or Notes on macOS or even the notes on my phone for simple needs. But Through time I had to write more and more especially at graduation year where writing the graduation project report required organized references and other stuff like a table of contents, table of figures, and list of figures. We actually did not use it with the graduation project and I am regretting that until this day. After graduation, I started my internship with a research center working specifically with deep learning to classify medical images, and going through a new area you need to do more research work more than anyone how been in the area for a long time. With the first report, I submit using Microsoft Word it was ok to the point one of the professors and researchers frown at the document and told me next time make sure you use LaTeX! I started exploring how to use LaTeX and the first impression was am I going to “code” my documents every time?!! I spent a couple of hours to understand it, and to be honest, was not that difficult to understand since the syntax pretty much like the English language. And before I know it I have become addicted to using LaTeX with every document I write.
Why College students must use LaTeX?
Microsoft word is perfect for most of the people, but for my situation, I had to switch to LaTeX because Microsoft word it did not meets my need. But when I remember what was the needs actually in college homework that involves complected equations, tables, figures, and so on or writing an essay where references need to be managed. And not only the college needs to that makes the students use LaTeX I think the students must explore what exactly the researcher uses for writing scientific research and make sense of what is the researcher’s job exactly, talking about the researcher’s work in a brief way of course! Like doing adjustments on the paper, handles the bibliography, and work with different sections within the paper separately and obviously more complicated work than this. However, all that talk because what I saw in college there is a huge gap between students and researchers -at least where I study- no collaboration between them, no summer camps in any research center in the college, or even a seminar about the research field.
What is Special about laTeX?
I encourage everyone to use LaTeX at least once and because these reasons:
- More specific details to build your documents: Most of the details might be provided by other software but either to be difficult to implement or not easy to find due to UI. Building complex tables could be the important details that not available on other software.
- Easy to organize references, figures numbers, and list of tables: This feature is not only about “organizing” specifically because all other software provides the idea of organizing so there is no point to mention it but using LaTeX you could easily refer to any kind of reference by labeling the object whether was a table, figure, reference, and equation
- Once you used to it, it becomes so easy: I am sure that most people will see how to create a document using LaTeX will say “No Thanks”. I think of using LaTeX for the first time like riding a bicycle for the first time, it will be difficult -for some people- no doubts in the beginning but as soon as you learn the syntax and how to build the document and basis needs like figure, equations, …etc. I really encourage you to start building templates for an all-purpose document, or template for images, tables, and others. All this to reduce the time to write the same things all over again.
- Free software: Colleges might provide for students a free student package for software like (Microsoft Office). Even when the student has free software I don’t think is a good idea to not try other things, and for something that expensive or popular it doesn’t mean to be the best in the market. Besides the student view of the software using LaTeX in the workplace could be a good idea where the template could be shared as a .tex file so anyone who wants to write a formal document must use the .tex template and then fill it with her/his personal information and the content.
- Easy to manage the big documents: When someone working on any kind of document that contains lots of sections, chapters, references, …etc. This might be annoying or even risky where there is a chance of losing all the document suddenly. LaTeX lets you separate sections or chapters and then easily assemble them together.
- Works on all operating systems: LaTeX is an open-source, and it is available in most operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Linux. There is a cloud-based LaTeX editor used for writing, editing, and publishing scientific documents called Overleaf It provides official journal LaTeX templates and direct submission links. And I highly recommend using it at the beginning.
One last this in Microsoft Work whenever you make a tiny adjustment the whole document gets messed up! (the doc doing “Parkour”).
Basics for using LaTeX
Simple Template with TOC:
\documentclass[12pt, onside]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[a4paper, total={6in, 8in}]{geometry}
\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.5}
\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref} % Allows clickable ref\begin{document}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%\newpage% For the List of figures\listoffigures\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{\numberline{}List of Figures}% For the List of tables
\listoftables\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{\numberline{}List of Tabels}% Create the table of content
\tableofcontents\newpage % New page to start the sections
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%\section{Section1}\subsection{Subsection}\subsection{Subsection}\subsection{Subsection}
\section{Section2}\subsection{Subsection}\subsubsection{Subsubsection}\subsubsection{Subsubsection}
\subsection{Subsection}\subsection{Subsection}
\section{conclusion}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%\newpage % New page to start references \clearpage\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran} % To use IEEE style in bibliography% File path fo the .bib which is contains all references \bibliography{ref.bib} % To include references in the TOC
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{\numberline{}References}\end{document}
Cover Page:
\begin{titlepage}
\begin{center}\textbf{\LARGE Name of the Company}\\
\line(1,0){300}\\
[0.30in]
\huge{\bfseries Report title}\\
[0.30in]
\line(1,0){200}\\
[0.30in]
\textbf{\LARGE Subtitle}\\
[0.30in]
\textit{\Large Name}\\
[0.50in]
\textbf{\small Date}
\end{center}\end{titlepage}
Mathematics Formulas:
Every time you want to write a math problem make there are many ways the simplest way is but it between two dollar signs $E=mc^2$and it is looking cool! Note that it is going to be within the line of the text, but if you put two dollar signs the equation will be isolated from the whole text $$PV=nRT$$
we can use fractions like this, and for integration, we can use it like this $$\int_{lower}^{upper}$$
example of integration : $$f(x)=\int_{a}^{b}x^2 dx$$
Moreover, LaTeX provides chemical equations, but before we can write any chemical equation we have to use preamble (mhchem) at the beginning of the document by writing :
\usepackage{mhchem} %allow us to write chemistry equations
now we can write chemistry equations: \ce{ H2O } we can go way beyond that! \ce{CH_{4(g)}+O_{2(g)}->CO_{2(g)}+2H_2O{(l)}}
There are many preambles that could help with mathematical equations like: \usepackage{xfrac} %allow us to use tiny fractions.
Last, the thing is what if we need to arrange or numbering the equation, label them, and refer to them easily in the whole document. By using
\begin{equation}lable{eq:relu}
ReLu(x)= max(0,x)
\end{equation}Now we can refer to the previous equation by writing \ref{eq:relu} and we can refer to the equations in the document.
In the end, I really encourage you to use https://oeis.org/wiki/List_of_LaTeX_mathematical_symbols to help you with the symbols and how to write them in LaTeX.
Figures:
There are many ways to create figures in LaTeX and here some of the basics. First, this is you must call the preamble \usepackage{graphicx}to use png, jpg, or eps and other formats
\begin{figure}[h] % placement specifier h:here, t:top, b:bottom
\centering % To make the image in the center
\includegraphics[height=3in]{Cat.jpeg} %specify the size and the path to the image.
\caption{Basic Figure.}
\label{fig:Basic Figure}
\end{figure}Not Just for students!
LaTeX in general is a text editor so it is not exclusive only for academia or students! Anyone could benefit from it from building a CV, writing books, formal letters, or even a presentation. You could find many many other uses for it. And I will mention one example for the formal letter it is easy to use every time you need to write a formal letter.
\documentclass[12pt]{letter} % Change the mode of the document.
\usepackage{geometry}[margin=0.5cm,left=0.5cm]\usepackage{hyperref}
\date{} %If you remove the curly brackets it will appear today's date.
\begin{document}\begin{letter}{
\\ Scranton \\ PA 18503 United States\\ March 29, 2005} % Location/date
\opening{Dear Employees:}I am writing to you to explain in his talking head that it's Diversity Day in the office and we will have a guest speaker at Dunder Mifflin Scranton in the confreres room to talk about diversity in the workplace.
I want this for a while. Corporate did not know ant thing it, I still believe it's very important to have this kind training in the workpalce.% The \ldots command produces dots in a way that will not upset
% the typesetting of the document.
\ldots\closing{Yours Faithfully, \\ Regional Manager of the Scranton branch Michael Scott}Signature:\end{letter}
\end{document}
At the end you can see my repo for more templates
