Workshop 16th March 2017 9 a.m. Boldrewood Campus B177/2023 NGCM CDT Common Room
Introducing LaTeX with LyX
Jack Saywell and Juraj Mihalik
Uni of Soton
- Categories
- NGCM
- Submitter
- Jack Saywell
We present an introduction to LaTeX, using the graphical user interface LyX.
Our motivation is to allow people to quickly gain familiarity with LaTeX, regardless of background.
LaTeX is the way to write academic literature in the sciences. This means it’s essential to learn at some point. Previous workshops have introduced the topic in a theoretical and rigorous way, which doesn’t lend itself to people who want to quickly gain familiarity, and so for this reason we are adopting a slightly different approach.
It is often remarked that LaTeX is the antithesis to the mantra WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), and this is very true. LaTeX is essentially code (a .tek file), which is compiled to form a document (e.g. pdf). The beauty of LaTeX comes from its customisability and how it can represent completely general mathematical equations in a beautiful and consistent way.
We are going to introduce LyX, a piece of software which is based on the philosophy WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) and is more akin to a word processing suite e.g. MS Word than writing bare LaTeX. However, it encourages a structured approach to document creation and allows combination of flexibility of LaTeX with the ease of a word processor. It's main advantage is that you see how the document appears in a clear way as you write it, and don't need to repeatedly re-compile into a pdf. This makes the document writing process more fluid.