The Productive Scholar: Rebecca Louie on using LaTeX

Posted on March 8, 2012 by John LeMasney
The LaTeX logo, typeset with LaTeX

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There is a fan­tas­tic free tool that you can use to cre­ate high qual­ity, pro­fes­sional doc­u­ments in the human­i­ties, arts, and sci­ences, and Rebecca Louie knows all about it.

Louie, a mem­ber of Prince­ton University’s Aca­d­e­mic Ser­vices, returned to talk again about LaTeX (prou­nounced lah-tech) at The Pro­duc­tive Scholar on March 8th, 2012. The video of her talk is below. LaTeX is described on their project home­page as:

…A high-quality type­set­ting sys­tem; it includes fea­tures designed for the pro­duc­tion of tech­ni­cal and sci­en­tific doc­u­men­ta­tion. LaTeX is the de facto stan­dard for the com­mu­ni­ca­tion and pub­li­ca­tion of sci­en­tific doc­u­ments. LaTeX is avail­able as free soft­ware.

In her talk, Louie described how LaTeX defines page lay­out and doc­u­ment struc­ture and makes use of global com­mands, which affect head­ers, page num­ber­ing, line spac­ing mar­gins, and the  doc­u­ment as a whole.

She also intro­duced the audi­ence to pack­ages, a set of over 2000 add-ons for LaTeX, whch offer addi­tional lay­out and type­set­ting com­mands and extend LaTeX’s func­tion­al­ity.  Ample doc­u­men­ta­tion is avail­able for pack­ages, and depend­ing on the pack­age, the doc­u­men­ta­tion may just be a few pages or hun­dreds of pages. Pack­ages offer exten­si­bil­ity in math, sym­bols, dia­grams, graph­ics, and many more areas.

Louie talked for some time about com­mands, envi­ron­ments, equa­tions, tem­plates, short­cut def­i­n­i­tions, and tables in LaTeX, and sug­gested that the audi­ence look at her resources linked below for more infor­ma­tion on these and other topics.

Louie pro­vided a cheat­sheet for LaTeX avail­able at http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/latexsheet.pdf, and sug­gested a LaTeX book, “A Guide to LATEX: Doc­u­ment Prepa­ra­tion for Begin­ners and Advanced Users” avail­able at http://www.amazon.com/Guide-LATEX-Document-Preparation-Beginners/dp/0201398257/ref=pd_sim_b_6

Here is her pre­sen­ta­tion in PDF format.

pro­duc­tive scholar talk

Here is a good The­sis tem­plate fpr Prince­ton: Please open it in NotePad or a sim­i­lar text editor:

http://www.math.princeton.edu/graduate/tex/puthesis.html

Finally, here is the video of her presentation.

And here are the abstract and bio for this talk.

LaTeX Tips and Tricks
Rebecca Louie
This talk will cover the basics of LaTeX, the type­set­ting lan­guage for pro­duc­ing sci­en­tific and tech­ni­cal man­u­scripts. It will touch on some of the use­ful pack­ages that can be used with LaTeX as well as doc­u­ment lay­out and for­mat­ting, and some use­ful tricks to save time. If you don’t use LaTeX every day, it can be dif­fi­cult to remem­ber every­thing that’s required but there are ways to make it eas­ier if you only use it occa­sion­ally – set­ting up tem­plates and short­cut com­mands for the things you do most can help a lot. Even though you may be com­fort­able with Word, LaTeX pro­duces a much nicer, cleaner look­ing, doc­u­ment and many pub­lish­ers require it.
About the speaker:
Rebecca Louie, as part of the Pro­gram in Applied and Com­pu­ta­tional Math­e­mat­ics for 12 years, worked with pro­fes­sors to pro­duce man­u­scripts, grant pro­pos­als, class hand­outs and notes, let­ters, and pre­sen­ta­tions using LaTeX. Rebecca is cur­rently the Admin­is­tra­tive Assis­tant for Aca­d­e­mic Ser­vices, OIT.
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