Learn LaTeX from these top articles of 2023

LaTeX is a powerful document preparation system that remains popular in the sciences. Based on Don Knuth's TeX system, LaTeX makes it easy to write scientific materials including academic articles and books, especially those that include equations. LaTeX is also supported by a rich ecosystem of add-ons and packages that support styling of different kinds of materials.

We ran several articles about LaTeX in the last year. These articles about how to write in LaTeX were the most popular with our readers:

Getting started with LaTeX

Start here if you are a beginner who wants to learn LaTeX. Like other document formatting programs, LaTeX collects words and fills paragraphs. That means you can add new text in the middle of a paragraph and not worry about how the final document will look. As long as you don't add a blank line in the middle of a paragraph, LaTeX creates fully justified paragraphs. When it finds a blank line in the document, LaTeX starts a new paragraph. This article also covers the basics of headings, lists, and different text formatting.

LaTeX by example

Sometimes you just need a sample document to work from. This sample file includes many of the common formatting you are likely to encounter with LaTeX, including paragraphs, bold, italics, block quotes, footnotes, lists, and equations. Use it as a handy reference guide for your next LaTeX document.

LaTeX by example: equations

Need help writing scientific and engineering documents with LaTeX? Use this sample document as a reference for equations and mathematics. This sample file includes many of the common math symbols you might need in most documents. Use this file as a quick reference guide to formatting equations with LaTeX.

LaTeX by example: code listings

The listings package, offered by default in most LaTeX installations, makes it easy to include source code into documents. With listings, LaTeX will format your code samples with special formatting to highlight keywords, strings, comments, and other components of the source code. listings provides distinct highlighting for different programming languages, such as C, FORTRAN, R, Matlab, Mathematica, and Python. 

LaTeX by example: tables

Sometimes, technical information can best be represented by a table rather than in words. Tables can highlight relationships between information, list data or observations from experiments, or order information by category. This article examines a sample LaTeX document that includes several versions of the same basic 3-column and 3-row table. The first example generates a plain, unstyled table with centered content. The next two samples generate tables with separator lines between columns and rows. The last example centers the table and uses left, center, and right justification for each column.