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- There is a fantastic free tool that you can use to create high quality, professional documents in the humanities, arts, and sciences, and Rebecca Louie knows all about it.
Louie, a member of Princeton University’s Academic Services, returned to talk again about LaTeX (prounounced lah-tech) at The Productive Scholar on March 8th, 2012. The video of her talk is below. LaTeX is described on their project homepage as:
…A high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.
In her talk, Louie described how LaTeX defines page layout and document structure and makes use of global commands, which affect headers, page numbering, line spacing margins, and the document as a whole.
She also introduced the audience to packages, a set of over 2000 add-ons for LaTeX, whch offer additional layout and typesetting commands and extend LaTeX’s functionality. Ample documentation is available for packages, and depending on the package, the documentation may just be a few pages or hundreds of pages. Packages offer extensibility in math, symbols, diagrams, graphics, and many more areas.
Louie talked for some time about commands, environments, equations, templates, shortcut definitions, and tables in LaTeX, and suggested that the audience look at her resources linked below for more information on these and other topics.
Louie provided a cheatsheet for LaTeX available at http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/latexsheet.pdf, and suggested a LaTeX book, “A Guide to LATEX: Document Preparation for Beginners and Advanced Users” available at http://www.amazon.com/Guide-LATEX-Document-Preparation-Beginners/dp/0201398257/ref=pd_sim_b_6
Here is her presentation in PDF format.
Here is a good Thesis template fpr Princeton: Please open it in NotePad or a similar text editor:
http://www.math.princeton.edu/graduate/tex/puthesis.html
Finally, here is the video of her presentation.
And here are the abstract and bio for this talk.
