Writing Equations/Symbols in LateX

Adrienne Kline
Geek Culture
Published in
5 min readMay 18, 2022

--

Image by Author

LateX is a phenomenal means of having dominion over document formatting. This is helpful if you require your research article in a double column format, want to move graphics to wrap text, create icons that serve as hyperlinks (in a CV/resume for example). There exist some word templates for such things (I am aware of IEEE’s in particular), but fighting the formatting is a nightmare.

Overleaf is a great cloud-based tool for writing in LateX, there exists a free version, but restrictions are placed on the number of files that can be shared/number of people you can share with. Other LateX editors include but are not limited to: TeXmaker, TeXnicCenter, LyX, TeXstudio, TeXworks and Papeeria. Here is a link to several that cover the pros and cons of each [2].

Overleaf supports a whole cohort of templates (resumes, theses, posters, reports, articles etc.) created by individuals and others which backed by particular academic journals, e.g. IEEE, Springer or presubmission text formats such as Arxiv.

Reasons to use LateX for equations:

I can honestly say when I have to create equations for a Word document or PowerPoint, I prefer to write in LateX rather than Word’s unicode. Both PowerPoint and Word now have equation editors that allow for LateX (see figure below) formatting and will compile and…

--

--

Adrienne Kline
Geek Culture

I'm an assistant professor @ Northwestern University and Head of AI & Eng. @ Northwestern Medicine's BCVI Center for AI