LaTeX

Not your regular rubberised goods

Once upon a time life was simple. When someone said that they’re into latex, there was only one interpretation that could come to mind.

image

Those days are past. We all know that the 21st Century is a complicated time. Latex outfits are more popular than ever, but now they face increasing rivalry from LaTeX. It has similar spelling, and also aims to enhance the natural beauty of anything that uses it.

Actually, my puns have been a bit naughty. You see, the second LaTeX isn’t pronounced “lateKS”. Instead, the idea is to prefix La onto the Greek spelling for Tech. (Anyone who has ever done a chi-square (χ²) test or walked past AXIΛΛEION (Achillion) Cakes in Coburg can tell you that the X is kind of like a letter K with its back broken.)

So what is this LaTeX (go on, say it: lay-tech) and why are researchers swarming to it in droves? Are they just confused and think they are signing up for some cosplay in latex outfits? Our LaTeX workshops do make extensive use of cat pictures. Could it be that we are only attracting Catwoman fans?

image

Well, while it would be quite reasonable for anybody to want to dress up like Catwoman, I’d argue that there are other good reasons to use LaTeX, such as for fun and profit. No, that’s not right. For research and publications, that’s what I mean.

LaTeX is what’s called a typesetting system. Back in the 1970s, a computer scientist named Donald Knuth got sick of publishers making his mathematics look ugly. Publishers, right?

Thanks to his background, Dr Knuth was in a good position to understand that beauty adheres to principles, and principles are exactly the kind of thing that computers are good at understanding. Thus the programming language TeX was born: a programming language that could convert simple plain text into beautifully typeset documents.

Unfortunately, TeX isn’t great at automating a lot of things we kind of expect from a non-trivial document. It doesn’t understand title pages, tables of contents, sections, or references. But not to worry! Since TeX is a programming language, all that extra useful stuff could be automated in later on.

And that is what happened. Not many years later, TeX fan Leslie Lamport released a whole bunch of useful extensions to TeX. Thus we get LaTeX from putting the first two letters of his surname onto TeX.

Today, LaTeX is used by anyone who needs to create large, complicated documents, or anyone who has special typesetting requirements, such as abstract notation and technical diagrams. LaTeX has traditionally been ubiquitous in fields like physics, computer science, mathematics and statistics, but is now attracting a lot of people from the arts and humanities as well.

In Research Bazaar, we have begun holding regular LaTeX workshops. About once a month for the last few months, a general audience has shown up cosplaying as academics and found themselves learning how to create beautiful documents.

LaTeX workshop

If you’d like to either attend one of our workshops, or if you just want a bit of help with your existing LaTeX project, get in touch and we’d love to help you out! You can also express interest in LaTeX or any other Research Bazaar workshops through a form at the bottom of this page.

You should also get in touch if you can already use a little bit of LaTeX and would like to help your fellow researchers by participating as a workshop helper. The less experience you have, the better! Novices love it when the people helping them turn out to be just humans who make mistakes and have to look things up on Google.

I’d like to give a big shout out to all the fantastic people who have already helped out at one point or another:

  • Tiane Ryman
  • Alexis Lucattini
  • Alex Zarebski
  • David Wakeham
  • Axel Almet
  • Ada Yan
  • Meirian Lovelace-Tozer
  • Andrew Elvey Price
  • Michael Lydeamore
  • Matthew Mack.

Thanks everyone!

Coming in the second half of 2016, we’re going to begin expanding the workshop material to cater to people who have gone beyond the bare basics. We’re currently seeking people interested in the following advanced topics:

  • General LaTeX Part II: More references, floats, and customisation.
  • Beautiful diagrams with PGF/TikZ.
  • Version controlling LaTeX documents with Git.
  • Integrating data analysis and visualisation with R into LaTeX using Sweave or KnitR.
  • Packages and bibliographies for the Arts and Humanities.

image
PGF/TikZ 		image
Git 		image
KnitR

It would be great to hear from you as well if you have ideas for other types of advanced LaTeX workshops, or if you’d like to run a workshop specialised for the interests of your research group or department.

(NB: Showing up to LaTeX workshops in cosplay or full body latex suits is not required. However, Research Bazaar loves novelty and diversity, so you can if you want to.)

Credits

This blog post used or linked to copyright images shared under various Creative Commons licences: