Araz Gholami

LaTeX (pronounced La-tek or sometimes Lay-tek) is a document preparation system created by Leslie Lamport in 1984. It’s built on top of TeX, a typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth in 1978. But the story goes further back: TeX was based on troff, an even older system written by Joe Ossanna in 1971.

LaTeX is to TeX what Bootstrap is to HTML. In simpler terms, TeX does the heavy lifting, but LaTeX makes it easier for writers to focus on content, not design.

Why LaTeX?

LaTeX emerged at a time when there were no modern word processors like Microsoft Word. Professors and researchers needed something robust to write their papers and academic documents—something that could handle complex formulas, citations, and structured content efficiently. Enter LaTeX, which still thrives today.

What has kept LaTeX alive for so long is its legendary speed when it comes to generating documents with well-defined structures—like tables of contents and mathematical equations. However, there’s a catch: you’ll need to invest time upfront to learn how to write LaTeX documents. For many, though, this investment pays off. A few hours of learning today can save you days of work in the future.

Getting Started

There are tons of tools to help you write LaTeX. If you’re just beginning, you might want to try:

• Overleaf: an online LaTeX editor
• Gummi: a native LaTeX editor for your desktop

LaTeX Basics

Here’s a simple example to help you understand the structure of a LaTeX document.

Identifying the Document Type:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\title{\textbf{Gummi 0.8.0}}
\author{Alexander van der Meij}
\date{}

\addtolength{\topmargin}{-3cm}
\addtolength{\textheight}{3cm}

Starting the Document:

\begin{document}

Setting the Title and Style:

\maketitle
\thispagestyle{empty}

Creating Sections and Paragraphs:

\section{Introduction}
Welcome to the latest release of Gummi - the simple {\LaTeX} editor. After a long break in development, we're finally back with version 0.8.0.\\
With this release we say farewell to the GTK2 toolkit and mark the beginning of the use of GTK3 within our codebase. Many other improvements were also made to enhance your Gummi experience. For a complete list of changes, please see our changelog\footnote{https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexandervdm/gummi/master/ChangeLog}.

Making Lists:

\section{Contributing}
If you'd like to contribute to this project, here's some ideas:
\begin{description}
\addtolength{\itemindent}{0.80cm}
\itemsep0em
\item[Development] fix bugs or add features to our C/GTK codebase
\item[Documentation] edit the user guide to improve user experience
\item[Localization] translate Gummi in your native language
\item[Testing] try out the latest and report your findings
\end{description}

Finishing the Document:

\end{document}

More Resources

If you’re ready to dive deeper into LaTeX, check out these resources:

• YouTube: LaTeX Crash Course
• Overleaf: a great online tool for LaTeX beginners and pros alike.

Once you get used to LaTeX, you’ll find that its speed and efficiency make it worth the initial learning curve. Just like investing a few hours upfront to master Vim, learning LaTeX can save you a ton of time and headaches down the road.