Technical Report Writing & Research Methodology
Introduction to Latex in Overleaf
Course Instructor
Laiq Hasan
CSE-5691: Technical Report Writing & Research Methodology
What is Latex?
LaTeX (pronounced LAY-tek or LAH-tek) is a tool used to create professional-
looking documents.
Based on the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) idea
You only have to focus on the contents of your document and the computer
will take care of the formatting.
Users can enter plain text and let LaTeX take care of the formatting (Unlike MS
word).
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Why use LaTeX?
LaTeX is used all over the world for scientific documents, books, as well as many
other forms of publishing.
Can create beautifully typeset documents.
Enables the user to tackle the complicated parts of typesetting like
Inputting mathematics.
Creating tables of contents.
Referencing and creating bibliographies and many more.
Has a number of open source packages providing endless formatting possibilities.
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How does it work?
You write your document in plain text with commands that describe its structure
and meaning.
The LaTeX program processes your text and commands to beautifully formatted
document.
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LaTeX modes of Usage
LaTeX can be used either in offline mode or online mode.
For using LaTeX offline, you need to install softwares like MiKteX (backend-runs all
the packages) and text editors like TeXstudio,WinEdt,TexNic (front end- where you
write all your LaTeX code).
For online mode, Overleaf is used.
Overleaf is an online LaTeX editor that is easy to use. No installation, real-time
collaboration,hundreds of LaTeX templates, and more.
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Overleaf
Templates for papers, presentations, newsletters, syllabi, books.
Online collaboration platform.
Output: nice PDF files.
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Login/Signup with Overleaf
Login or Register with Overleaf -https://www.overleaf.com/
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Overleaf Structure
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Creating a project in Overleaf
Select New Project > Blank Project > Give it a name > Create
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Writing your first piece of LaTeX
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Understanding the first piece of Latex
Class declares the type of the document.
Controls the overall appearance of the document.
Different types of documents will require different classes i.e. a CV/resume will require a
different class than a scientific paper.
In this case, the class is article, the simplest and most common LaTeX class.
Report or book are some other type of classes.
The content of our document is enclosed inside the \begin{document} and
\end{document} tags.
This is known as the body of the document.
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The preamble of a document
Everything in your .tex file before the \begin{document} tag is called the
preamble.
In the preamble you define
The type of document you are writing.
The packages you would like to use.
Several other elements.
Example shows LaTeX document of font size 12 (default 10),paper size letterpaper
and encoding utf8.
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Adding Author, Date and Title
\documentclass[12pt, letterpaper, twoside]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\title{Enter Document Name Here}
\author{Enter Author Name Here}
\date{Enter Date Here}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
We have now added a title, author and date to our LaTeX
document!
\end{document}
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Adding Comments
\begin{document}
\maketitle
We have now added a title, author and date to our first Latex
document!
% This line here is a comment. It will not be printed in the
document.
\end{document}
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Bold, Italics and Underline
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Some of the \textbf{greatest}
discoveries in \underline{science}
were made by \textbf{\textit{accident}}.
\end{document}
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Adding Images
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\graphicspath{ {images/} }
\begin{document}
The universe is immense and it seems to be homogeneous,
in a large scale, everywhere we look at.
\includegraphics{universe}
Here is picture of a cat.
\end{document}
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Captions, labels and references
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\graphicspath{ {images/} }
\begin{document}
\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.25\textwidth]{mesh}
\caption{a nice plot}
\label{fig:mesh1}
\end{figure}
As you can see in the figure \ref{fig:mesh1}, the
function grows near 0. Also, in the page \pageref{fig:mesh1}
is the same example.
\end{document}
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Unordered List
\begin{itemize}
\item The individual entries are indicated with a black dot, a so-
called bullet.
\item The text in the entries may be of any length.
\end{itemize}
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Ordered List
\begin{enumerate}
\item This is the first entry in our list
\item The list numbers increase with each entry we add
\end{enumerate}
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Adding Math to Latex
Inline
In physics, the mass-energy equivalence is stated by the equation
$E=mc^2$, discovered in 1905 by Albert Einstein.
Displayed
The mass-energy equivalence is described by the famous equation
\[ E=mc^2 \]
discovered in 1905 by Albert Einstein.
In natural units ($c = 1$), the formula expresses the identity
\begin{equation}
E=m
\end{equation}
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Sections
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This is our first LaTeX document for technical writing class.
\section{Introduction}
\section{Background}
\section{Literature Review}
\end{document}
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Subsections
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This is our first LaTeX document for technical writing class.
\section{Introduction}
\section{Background}
\section{Literature Review}
\subsection{Subsection 1 of Lit Review}
\subsection{Subsection 2 of Lit Review}
\end{document}
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Latex : Endless Possibilities
There are endless things you can do with LaTeX.
Explore more on the official site of overleaf : https://www.overleaf.com/
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Assignment
Write the Abstract and Literature Review part of your MSc proposal in LaTeX.
Submission deadline. Two weeks starting from today.
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