Latex is an open-source document preparation system that was designed for scholarly and technical writing, and is great for handling large documents.
If you have never seen Latex before it may look like a daunting task. However with a little practice, it is not only easy to use, but also provides a way for you to make your work look like the professional typeset math you see on your homework.
The best way to learn Latex, and to start using it, is to go through the resources below. They will walk you through the basics of Latex and show you some of the more commonly used commands.
For those of us who use Latex to write up our math, it can be frustrating when you’re doing your homework and your latex looks like this:
instead of like this:
But why does this happen? Well, one of the reasons that Latex is so great is that it offers a lot of control over how things look and what the output will be. However, the default settings are meant to make everything look “pretty” by default and in some cases can cause issues with math looking as good as it should. For example, if I type
Latex is a markup language like HTML, but with a more specialized purpose. Latex was designed to create beautiful mathematical equations and formulas that are easy to render. It separates content from presentation, and allows you to control how your document will look. By using the following commands: \begin{matrix}\end{matrix}, \begin{equation} \end{equation}, and \begin{align} \end{align}, you can create very powerful ways of rendering your math code. This guide covers some of the most important features of these commands and provides examples for how each one is used.
Most of the times, documents use \textit{italics} to emphasize a point or to highlight a word.
If you want to write \textbf{bold} text, you can use command \textbf{}.
You can produce different sizes of bold text (\textbf{\large}).
This is one way to write and format your Latex code.
Math is not just numbers. Math is also variables, operators, and functions. When writing out math in latex code, it is important to understand the differences between these different parts of math.
Variables are things that change. They are letters that we use to represent a number we don’t know yet or a number that changes over time. Variables can be represented by one letter or many letters in a row.
Operators are what help us compare variables or evaluate them. Operators can be addition, subtraction, multiplication, division or any other symbol that helps us find the value of what’s being evaluated.
Functions are rules that determine how one variable changes in relation to another. Functions can be represented as f(x) where x represents the input and f(x) represents the output after applying the function to x.
Now you are ready to begin your Latex document. This is made up of two parts: the pre-amble, which contains your imports and formatting, and the main body.
The pre-amble will look something like this:
The equation environment is used to typeset one formula. The **equation* environment is used to typeset multi-line formulas. It also has a number of features which help to format equations in a desired way.
The following code shows some simple examples of equations$$
\begin{aligned}
x^2+y^2&=z^2\\
(x+y)^4&=(x+y)(x+y)(x+y)(x+y)\\
a_n&=\frac{1}{n^2},\quad n\geq 1\\
f(x)&=\begin{cases}
0&\text{for }x<0\\ 1&\text{for }x\geq 0. \end{cases} \end{aligned}$$