LaTeX Installation and Editors – LaTeX – Library Guides at Penn State University

About LaTeX

 LaTeX is a document typesetting system that can produce attractive articles, books, and slides. It is especially useful when writing documents that have a lot of mathematical notation. LaTeX is a computer programming language and takes a little bit of time and practice to learn. The purpose of this guide is to provide a basic introduction to LaTeX. If your professors require you to write your thesis in latex, they should have information on more specific resources available to help you out.

LaTeX is a markup language like HTML. Markup languages allow you to tell the computer program (the LaTeX compiler in this case) the structure of the document, and have it generate a document for you. There are pros and cons to using a markup language rather than a word processor to make your document. Some people would argue that using a markdown language allows you to focus on the content and not the formatting of your document, and that LaTeX produces documents that are better looking than word processors. Another advantage to LaTeX is that it is open source, which means that anyone can work on it and improve it. It is also free of charge and available on all of the common operating systems. A con of using LaTeX is that you can’t see what the result will look like instatainisly, and also, more people have word processors, so this makes collaborating more difficult. In LaTeX it is sometimes challenging to get the formatting right if you want to move away from the default settings, so if you want to make the document look a certain way, LaTeX might not be the best solution in that case, although templates can help with this.

About This Guide

This guide serves to give an introduction to LaTeX, as well as provide links to resources for more exploration. Use the links on the left to naviagate to the page that is appropriate for you.