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LaTeX (LinguiSkills)

What’s in here:

The LaTeX philosophy

Quick start guide, to get from a .tex file to a .pdf file

Resources

The LaTeX Philosophy

It should be easy to get a good-looking, professional document

When writing, you should focus on content, not aesthetics

Minimize menial work: automate as much as possible

In contrast: WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get

e.g., Microsoft Word, Google Docs

You can manipulate how things look as you write

You have near total control over how things look

Less automation, more manual work

The idea

LaTeX is a markup language and a compiler.

Used like a programming language:

Write your document in plain-text, save it as a .tex file. (the content)

The file contains commands which tells the compiler how things should look. (the formatting)

Run the compiler, which takes the .tex file and generates a .pdf file.

Nice side effects

Includes commands which lets you easily typeset mathematical notation, diagrams, tables, etc.

Also includes commands to create linguistics-specific things such as:

syntax trees

semantics formulas

OT tableaux

and much more

Automates many things such as:

example numbering (and other numbered items, like sections, figures, page numbers, and footnotes)

citations and bibliographies

Bad side effects

High learning curve

Sometimes unintuitive

Lose control over certain things

Quick start guide

Get LaTeX: https://www.latex-project.org/get/

Find your workflow:

The simple way: plain-text editor (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac) + typeset on the command line [not recommended]

The easy way: a dedicated latex editor (TeXshop, Texpad)

The hardcore way: fancy text-editor + latex plugin (vim + vim-latex, SublimeText + LaTeXTools)

In the cloud: Overleaf, sharelatex

Hello World

Here is a minimal example of a latex file.

\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}

\begin{document}

Hello world!