The Student’s Guide to LaTeX Markup: What It Is and Why You Want It
With another academic year around the corner, whether classes are in person or online, now is a good time to look into a useful tool that you may come across. LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tek”) is a typesetting tool that is very widely used in academic papers, and many textbooks as well. If you’re studying a math-heavy field, it will save you a lot of frustration.
While you’re probably familiar with writing papers in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, LaTeX is a very different beast. Instead of having a graphical interface where you use the mouse to click through menus and manually modify text until it looks how you want (“What You See Is What You Get”), which can be a laborious process for more complicated documents, the LaTeX philosophy is more What You Get Is What You Mean. You write plain text files with special syntax outlining your content, focusing solely on the content, and the software generates a clean, consistently styled document for you. It’s like a programming language (or, more aptly, a markup language like HTML) for professional quality typesetting.
“Why would I want to use something so archaic and unintuitive?” you’re probably thinking. Sure, if you’re just banging out a quick essay for a school assignment, it’s probably best to use what you’re familiar with. But as the scope of what you write…
