Writing reports with LaTeX

LaTeX is a document preparation system. LaTeX is based on TeX, which is a typesetting engine that can do anything.

The main purpose of these systems, and the reason we want you to learn this, is to prepare high quality documents and reports. LaTeX lets you focus on the contents of the report: you say what should go in, if anything should be emphasized, what’s the contents of figures, the data for references etc. and LaTeX will put this content together in a form that is comforable to read and aesthetically pleasing.

So what about word processors like Microsoft Word of LibreOffice Writer? Well, word processors are to readability as food processors are to restaurant critics. Of course, it’s possible to achieve good results with a word processor too, it’s just that it requires much more effort than most people imagine (this brings up a few of the things that one must ensure manually with the word processor). So using a system like LaTeX is actually makes better results more easy to achieve.

Learning LaTeX

The following videos give a basic introduction to LaTeX. Then you can proceed with the text below which provides some more details.

Run through the LearnLaTeX tutorial. We recommend that you try the Overleaf editor, since that is an option for easy experimentation in the tutorial. KTH provides Overleaf Professional for all students, you just need to register an account using your KTH email address. (Or add your KTH address, if you’ve already signed up for the free version.)

With Overleaf Professional you can use Overleaf with Git. However, to use branching and pull-requests to their full extent, you’ll have to use a local editor (as in the videos above) instead of Overleaf. All powerful text editors have syntax highlighting and auto-completion support for LaTeX.

The material has talked about producing books and reports so far. It’s also possible to use LaTeX to produce slides. One way to do that is with beamer. Overleaf has a short tutorial, but we recommend the documentation for beamer — that documentation is actually written as a guide to good presentations in general, well worth reading.

Assessment

Write a short document (article, using the article document class) in LaTeX with the following requirements: it must contain

a title,
a table of contents,
a figure,
a citation with a reference, you can use Libris (web) or libris.sh (terminal) to create a BibTeX reference to a book;
a listing, using the listings package, that contains your command line history (the output of the history command).

The document source files (i.e. the LaTeX files, and not as e.g. a zip file) must be committed and pushed to your repository on KTH GitHub for the course. We’ll compile the PDF ourselves to see that it works.

We assess that by doing this you can create and compile technical reports; handle submissions of (program) code with version control tools and, finally, control the computer environment via the command line.