What you’ll be creating

Preamble

In the preamble, make sure the following to packages are called:

\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{multirow}

The booktabs package is needed to typeset good looking tables. I’ve written a post on the booktabs package earlier. The multirow package is needed to create cells spanning multiple rows in your LaTeX tables.

Document

I’ve created a simple 3-column table to illustrate the method by using the multirow command that comes with the multirow package:

\begin{table}
	\centering%
	\begin{tabular}{lll}
	\toprule
	First 	& Second 		& Third \\
	\midrule
	1 	& 			& \multirow{2}{80pt}{AB} \\
	2 	& 			& 	\\
	3 	& \multirow{-3}{*}{123} & C     \\
	\bottomrule
	\end{tabular}
\end{table}

The multirow command is defined as follows:

\multirow{nrows}{width}{content}

• nrows: number of rows to be spanned.
• width: width of the content.
• content: the text that will be printed

Note that this number may be positive or negative, as illustrated in the example. In the second column, -3 was used in the last rows. This means that the third row and the 2 previous rows are merged. In the rightmost column, nrows was set to 2 on row 1. This merges the first and second row.
The width may be set to either a length measure or an asterix (*). The latter needs to be used to set the contents’ natural width.

The obvious

Without being too arrogant, I’d like to point out the main goal of this blog is helping beginners to get started with LaTeX. That is also why I’ve written a quick guide and quite a few beginner-level posts. Note that some posts on this blog are actually more advanced, so don’t be scared by some of the content.

• The five minute guide to LaTeX

Online communities

Probably the best way to get your questions answered is using forums. My favorite one, and also the best for beginners, is LaTeX Communtity. For more sophisticated answers, TeX.SE is very good.

• LaTeX Communtity: Very good and helpful for beginners
• TeX StackExchange: Focus is on more advanced topics

Tutorials and guides

Probably the most used and most searched for document on getting started with LaTeX is “The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2ε“. Although this guide includes just about anything you want to know about LaTeX, I do not recommend this one. It will absolutely overwhelm you with all the possibilities in LaTeX, while a beginner should just learn how to create a simple document. All the rest will follow.
Having this in mind, a guide that covers only the very basics that I really like is Andy Roberts’ website on getting grips with LaTeX. His site contains basic and illustrative tutorials.
Lastly, I also really like the Wikibooks pages on LaTeX. They contain a lot of information, especially covering the basics of LaTeX.

• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2ε: This is probably too much for a LaTeX beginner
• Getting grips with LaTeX: A collection of very basic tutorials
• Wikibooks pages on LaTeX: A very nice overview on a wide variety of topics

LaTeX installation

Before following any tutorial on LaTeX, you’d want to install it on you computer ;-) Unfortunately, most short guides for beginners don’t cover this subject. It is often found a bit scary or something. However, installing LaTeX is not difficult at all. I’ve written tutorials on how to install LaTeX on Windows and on OS X. I’m not experienced with LaTeX on Linux, but I’ve been told that this is a good tutorial for that.

• Installing LaTeX on Windows
• Installing LaTeX on Mac OS X
• Installing LaTeX on Ubuntu Linux

Miscellaneous

Last but not least, I’d like to point out three resources that should be bookmarked in your browser. You’ll likely be using these resources A LOT when using LaTeX. The first one is the LaTeX cheat sheet; a two-pages document containing all important LaTeX commands (and even a bit more). Secondly, two resources on symbols in LaTeX. So many different (math) symbols exist that I will definitely never learn them by heart. Fortunately, I don’t have to because of The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List and Detexify. The first is a very large document containing a lot, if not all, symbols and their commands. Detexify is a great little web tool that allows you to draw a symbol and it will automatically search for the corresponding command.

• LaTeX cheat sheet
• The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List
• Detexify

Update: more resources

I forgot to mention (at least) one important resource: writeLaTeX.com. This is my favorite LaTeX web compiler, as already highlighted in a previous post.

• writeLaTeX.com

More resources?

If you’re new to this site, you might not know that there actually is a section containing a lot of (La)TeX resources; latex.howtotex.com. Have a look there to find many, many more.

The idea of this post came from this question on TeX.SE, and part of the solution is obtained using this answer on TeX.SE.

What you’ll be creating

The example

The example we will be working on will be as simple as possible; a sine function:

The image is created with the following code:

\documentclass{article}
 
% load the required package(s)
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=newest} % necessary for new features
 
% begin document
\begin{document}
% create a TikZ picture
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    set layers,
    domain=0:10,
    grid=both
]
\addplot+[no marks] {sin(deg(x))};
 
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
% close document
\end{document}

This piece of code won’t be explained any further. It is just a very minimal document that plots a sine function (sin(x), x=1:10) using TikZ.

Highlighting

In order to give a thorough illustration, I’ll highlight three areas in the sine plot that was described above. The choice for multiple highlighted areas is done in order to illustrate some of the functions you can play with. See the highlighted plot below:

This TikZ image is created with the following lines of code:

\documentclass{article}
 
% load the required package(s)
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=newest} % necessary for new features
 
% code to enable highlighting
\pgfkeys{%
  /tikz/on layer/.code={
    \pgfonlayer{#1}\begingroup
    \aftergroup\endpgfonlayer
    \aftergroup\endgroup
  }
}
 
\pgfplotsset{
    highlight/.code args={#1:#2}{
        \fill [every highlight] ({axis cs:#1,0}|-{rel axis cs:0,0}) rectangle ({axis cs:#2,0}|-{rel axis cs:0,1});
    },
    /tikz/every highlight/.style={
        on layer=\pgfkeysvalueof{/pgfplots/highlight layer},
        blue!20	% default color of highlighted area
    },
    /tikz/highlight style/.style={
        /tikz/every highlight/.append style=#1
    },
    highlight layer/.initial=axis background	% default depth
}
% end code to enable highlighting
 
% begin document
\begin{document}
% create a TikZ picture
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    set layers,
    domain=0:10,
    grid=both
]
\addplot+[%
	no marks,
	% first highlighted area (in blue by default) 
	highlight=0:2, 				% range
	% second highlighted area (color changed to red) 	
	highlight style={red!20},	% color
	highlight layer=axis ticks,	% depth
	highlight=6:8,				% range
	% first highlighted area (color changed to green) 	
	highlight style={green!20},	% color
	highlight layer=axis foreground,	% depth
	highlight=7:7.5				% range	
	] 
	{sin(deg(x))};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
% close document
\end{document}

Now, the important parts of this code are commented but nonetheless I’ll be discussing the color, layer depth and range a bit more.

Color

Color of the highlighted area is blue!20 by default, as defined in the preamble of the document. When having multiple highlighted areas, you might want to give each area a different color. To do this, specify highlight style={...} within the tikzpicture environment (as an argument of addplot+).
In the example above I’ve highlighted three areas: one with the default color (blue!20) and two of a different color (red!20 and green!20).

Layer depth

The layer depth is the layer on wich the highlight is printed. In most cases, it is best to add a layer in the very background (this is also set by default). Change the layer depth with highlight layer=..., default value is ‘axis background’. The sequence is layer depth is:
axis background, main, axis grid, axis ticks, axis lines, axis tick labels, axis descriptions, axis foreground.
The three highlighted areas in the example above illustrate the effect of the layer depth. The green area’s depth is set to axis ticks and it can be seen that that area is printed on top of the grid (which is the deepest layer). The red area is printed on the very top layer.

Range

Determine the range of the highlighted area by specifying highlight=.... Note that this one is necessary to actually print the area (the color and layer depth described above are not). All options concerning color/style and layer depth should be specified before this command.

Quite a few online LaTeX editors exist. My personal favorite is writeLaTeX.com. Feel free to visit the website and read everything about it. Also, since it’s free I highly recommend signing up.

My answer

If you comment on a post with a question about a bug in your LaTeX code or something similar, I’ll try to fix your code and illustrate the outcome by sharing a link to a writeLaTeX online document.

So, let’s assume someone asks how to write ‘Hello world!’ in LaTeX (Note: this might not be a very realistic question ;-) ). To answer this question as clear as possible, I’ll illustrate it right away in a working LaTeX document. This document is made online with writeLaTeX and the link is shared with the person that asks the question, and with everyone else that is interested. Here’s what I’ll reply:

View my answer on writeLaTeX.com

Restoring the original answer

Everyone is able to edit shared documents on writeLaTeX.com. This is in most cases very advantageous, but it also means that everyone is able to edit my original answer. Fortunately, writeLaTeX.com has version control implemented and I’ll always save my original answer such that anyone is able to restore the document. Here’s how to do that.

1. Go to ‘history’ in the menu bar of the writeLaTeX.com interface.
2. Find the original version, which is in this case saved as ‘ORIGINAL by howtoTeX.com’, and click on ‘restore’.

The image below illustrates these steps.

Feedback

Please let me know if this new system of answering questions is working for you. I think my answers will be more clear if I use writeLaTeX.com as described in this post, but if you disagree please say so. For any writeLaTeX related questions or feedback, you can also contact its founders directly via https://www.writelatex.com/contact.

The template makes use of the article documentclass. Two packages are important: babel and parallel. The first is used to select the languages for the main content and the second package is needed to create the two column layout.

The babel package

The babel package should be well-known to you. In this template, it is called as follows:

\usepackage[english,german]{babel}

Hence, the english en german languages are loaded. In the main content of the template, the languages are selected with the selectlanguage command. For example, the english language is selected with

\selectlanguage{english}

The parallel package

The parallel package is used to create a two column layout, where each columns contains text in a different language. For english in the left and german in the right column, we do:

	\selectlanguage{english}
\ParallelLText{\blindtext}
	\selectlanguage{german}
\ParallelRText{\blindtext}

The parallel package also makes sure that, when a paragraph in one language is shorter than the other, the next paragraph begins at the same line for both languages. In order to say to LaTeX that a paragraph is ended, we type

\ParallelPar

Line numbering

As a final decoration, line numbering is added to the document. This is done because I often see it in bilingual documents. It is achieved with the lineno package. In the preamble, after \usepackage{lineno}, add \linenumbers.

Download

Download PDF
Download TEX

Usage

The usage is extremely simple. Add the following to the preamble:

\usepackage{tocbibind}

THis, by default, includes a number of things to the table of contents: the Table of Contents itself, the List of Figures, the List of Tables, the Bibliography and the Index. If you want to exclude one of these, add the following package options:

• notbib to remove the Bibliography
• notindex to remove the Index
• nottoc to remove the Table of Contents
• notlof to remove the List of Figures
• notlot to remove the List of Tables

For example, to suppress the inclusion of the List of Figures:

\usepackage[notlof]{tocbibind}

More

More options are described in the package documentation.

I’ve used the article class and the changed the standard font to Times (using the mathptmx package). Furthermore, the multicol package is used to create the two column layouts that displays the authors.

Download

Download PDF
Download TEX

I also contributed my part: an article about matlab2tikz.

I wrote this post to inform you about these articles, enjoy!

The pfnote package

Call the package in your preamble with the following line:

\usepackage{pfnote}

That’s all!

Example

Take a look at the pfnote documentation, or actually the yafoot documentation as pfnote is part of this bundle. This document uses the package, which is noticeable by the footnotes at every page.

An example

Let’s start with an example. Since we will be working with cross-reference, the essential cleveref package will also be used.

\documentclass[]{article}
 
\usepackage[]{showkeys}
\usepackage{cleveref}
 
\begin{document}
\section{First section}\label{sec:first}
 
\begin{equation}\label{eq:einstein}
	e = mc^{2}
\end{equation}
 
In \cref{sec:first} on page \pageref{sec:first} we 
find the famous Einstein equation (\cref{eq:einstein}).
\end{document}

This shouldn’t be all to hard to understand. A section is created and labelled, as well as an equation. Then, cross-references are made to these labels. The empty square brackets in \usepackage[]{showkeys} are there because we will be discussing some of the package options later. For now, create a LaTeX document just like this and notice that the labels are printed in the page margins. You should be seeing this.

Package options

By default, the label keys are shown in the margin. In order to suppress them, add the final option:

\usepackage[final]{showkeys}

The options notref and notcite stop the package from redefining the normal cross-references and citations, respectively.