- Level
- Workshop for researchers
- Prerequisites
- None. No experience with LaTeX or programming is needed.
- Length
- 2 sessions of 2.5 hours, one week apart
- Tools
- LaTeX, Overleaf (the free version is enough)
- Taught
- 2 terms, Spring 2022 and Spring 2023
- License
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Overview
Introduction to LaTeX teaches researchers who have little or no experience with LaTeX, or with any other programming language, to typeset documents with LaTeX. I taught it as a two-session mini-course for the Interdisciplinary Training in the Social Sciences (ITSS) program at CU Boulder. Along with LaTeX itself, the workshop teaches computational thinking: participants iterate, debug, and look for answers in documentation and on question-and-answer sites. No one knows every command, and looking things up is a normal part of the work.
Each session is about 2.5 hours and mixes lecture with activities. The slides show short, complete example documents that participants can copy and change, and in the first session the class and I build a list and a table together. The second session ends with office hours, where participants debug their own documents.
The workshop uses Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor, so participants do not have to install LaTeX or manage packages and fonts. The free version is enough.
Learning objectives
- Write documents with the basic syntax of LaTeX: commands, environments, reserved characters, and comments.
- Practice computational thinking: iteration, debugging, and abstraction.
- Configure documents with document classes and packages.
- Typeset text, lists, figures, tables, and equations.
- Divide long, complex documents into separate files, with chapters and a bibliography.
- Make presentations, posters, and figures with LaTeX.
Topics
| Session | Module | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Background | What LaTeX is: history, culture, costs and benefits; Overleaf or a local installation; customizing and debugging |
| 1 | Syntax | Basics: a minimum example; paragraphs, reserved characters, and comments; commands and environments |
| 1 | Front matter | Setup: document classes, packages, and the preamble (title, author, abstract, date) |
| 1 | Formatting | Text: sections; style, size, and font; quotation marks; diacritics and special characters; alignment, indents, and line spacing |
| 1 | Lists and tables | Structure: list environments and helper packages; tables, merged cells, and helper packages; a list and a table built together |
| 1 | Figures | Images: including image files; captions and labels; side-by-side subfigures |
| 2 | Math | Equations: inline and displayed math; symbols and Greek letters; subscripts and superscripts; fractions, sums, and matrices |
| 2 | Modularity | Long documents: chapters in separate files with \include and \input; comments and tracked changes |
| 2 | Bibliographies | Citations: BibTeX entries; citing; bibliography styles and natbib |
| 2 | Presentations | Slides and graphics: Beamer slides; posters; diagrams with TikZ |
| 2 | Office hours | Debugging: help with participants’ own documents |
Readings
There is no textbook. These are the open references that the slides link to.
- General: the LaTeX Project’s user guide; the Wikibooks LaTeX book; Overleaf’s documentation; Learn LaTeX; Roberts, Getting to Grips with LaTeX; the LaTeX2e cheat sheet; TeX Stack Exchange
- Session 1: Rotabi, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Kleinberg, “Competition and Selection Among Conventions” (2017) and “Tracing the Use of Practices Through Networks of Collaboration” (2017), two studies of how LaTeX users share and reuse code; the LaTeX Font Catalogue; Detexify, which finds the command for a symbol that you draw
- Session 2: the Wikibooks list of mathematical symbols; the Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List; Overleaf’s bibliography styles; Better BibTeX for Zotero; TeXample TikZ examples; the tikz-network package
Assignments and assessment
There are no graded assignments and no formal evaluation. Participants practice during the sessions instead.
Examples come with every slide that shows code. Each one is a complete document that participants can copy into Overleaf and change.
Group activities take place in Session 1, when the class and I build a non-trivial list and a non-trivial table together.
Office hours close Session 2. Participants bring their own documents and debug them with me.
Adopt this course
Participants need only Overleaf in a web browser. The free version is enough; paid versions add features such as tracked changes and synchronization with GitHub. A local installation (MiKTeX on Windows or MacTeX on a Mac, with a text editor) also works, but package and font management cause more problems that way.
There is no data to prepare. The examples are on the slides.
The repository has the slides for Session 1 and Session 2 as PDF files, with their LaTeX source in the Source folder. The slides use cubeamer, a CU Boulder Beamer template based on the metropolis theme, so swap in your own Beamer theme if you adapt them. The Session 2 slides start with the figures section again; skip it if Session 1 already covered figures.
The workshop runs as two sessions of about 2.5 hours, one week apart. Session 1 has about twice as many slides as Session 2, and Session 2 leaves time for office hours. The Spring 2023 plan also listed a topic on variables, counters, and functions for Session 2, but the slides leave it out. The repository is under the MIT License; the material on this page is under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Past offerings
I ran the workshop twice. For Spring 2023, I moved figures from Session 2 into Session 1.
| Term | Design | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| Spring 2022 | Session 1: history, culture, syntax, formatting, lists, and tables. Session 2: figures, math, document structure, bibliographies, and presentations | — |
| Spring 2023 | The design on this page | Repository |
Course materials on this page are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: reuse and adapt them with credit, not for commercial use, and share adaptations under the same license. Last reviewed October 8, 2026.