My previous LaTeX Courses in Finnish and English.
LaTeX is a document preparation system originally published in 1985 by Leslie Lamport. It is based on Donald Knuth's seminal work, the TeX system, dating back to 1978. Being greatly ahead of its time, LaTeX is nowadays used not only by mathematicians and computer scientists, but also as a back-bone for many automated document generation engines (including the R Vignette long-term documentation system).
There are several reasons why LaTeX is worth learning:
- Manuscripts are kept in plain text, and hence easily versioned (e.g. with Git) and collaboratively edited
- Document generation can be automated
Engines like pandoc can convert Markdown to PDF via LaTeX. Thus, you may not need to learn LaTeX in full to be productive, but some background information is always useful.
These slides are some years old now, but I have got positive feedback about them and the LaTeX system is generally very stable. For example, the newer English version compiles out-of-the box with Fedora 27 and TeX Live 2017 (version 2017-05-24).
- LaTeX-course 2011 Course in English. Printable A4
- LaTeX-kurssi 2005 Course in Finnish. Printable A4