Since the beginning of the 1980 decade I've been using the LaTeX
system to write papers, books, lecture notes, exams and even letters.
In 2016 I taught a LaTeX course dubbed "Interdisciplinary Skills"
for engineering graduate students, together with professors
João Canas Ferreira, from Electric Engineering, and João António
Correia Lopes, from Informatics and Computing Engineering. In 2021 the
Mechanical Engineering students chapter asked me to deliver
a three-session seminar on introduction to LaTeX.
Program
- Introduction. Text formatting. Special characters. Advantages
and disadvantages of mark-up languages. LaTeX documents processing cycle.
- Instalation. Downloading and installing LaTeX and its auxiliary
packages.
- Document styles. LaTeX styles and packages. Document's structure
and format.
- Symbols and equations. Mathematical equations in LaTeX.
- Text blocks. Lists. Tables. Pre-formatted blocks. Multi-column
text. Footnotes.
- Graphics. Including graphic files. Packages to make illustrations
and mathematical diagrams.
- Bibliographies. References and bibliographic databases. Using
bibtex.
- Indices. Table of contents. List of figures. Using
makeindex to generate indices.
- Papers. Scientific paper preparation using editor's provided
packages.
- Tesesh. Specific styles for theses and their adaptation to
the style used at FEUP.
- Presentations. Making slides and Web pages. Package
beamer.
- Extensions. Creating new commands. Modifying and adapting
packages and styles.
