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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