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LaTeX training

(14 posts)

  1. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    I'm thinking of organising an informal introduction to LaTeX for philosophers at the LSE and I'm wondering whether anyone here has any advice on this topic.

    Has anyone done something like this before? I've email the UK TeX Users Group to see if they can suggest any resources for teaching LaTeX.

    I worry that most of my LaTeX knowledge is "passive knowledge" and I'm not really aware of what things I really need to teach people at first. I am more or less self-taught and I like messing around with the innards of this stuff. But I appreciate that my target audience are not computer geeks like me, but philosophers who have learned to hate Word Equation Editor: they will just want stuff to work with minimal fuss.

    Any advice?

    Posted 1 year ago #

  2. Kevin Klement
    Key Master

    I haven't done anything like that, but I've been tempted to try it; Charlie's been throwing around the idea of an online course or webinar, so maybe he'd have some ideas.

    I was going to suggest looking at the materials from Joseph Wright and Nicola Talbot's recent training day at UEA, but you've already gotten that advice from the horse's mouth at your post at the LaTeX StackExchange site.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  3. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    Thanks for your answer at SE, Kevin. I will definitely write up a report on how it went for PhilTeX when I do it.

    I like the idea of an online course. I'd be interested in hearing more about that...

    Posted 1 year ago #

  4. Charlie Tanksley
    Key Master

    Seamus,

    I think this is a great idea. Kevin is right that I've been thinking about an online course like this for the summer (inspired by the class in Ruby I started (but failed to finish...) at http://rubylearning.org/class/.

    Unfortunately, I haven't gotten very far in my planning (I just have the idea), so I really want to hear more about this after you do it (and, if I think I'll have time to put this together this spring, I'll be sure to get you involved in the project).

    My only real thoughts are that I think you can afford to take it quite slow. Explain installation and show them the way around a text editor (an easy one--not emacs!), show them the basic document markup (and maybe give them a copy of a complete prologue), and then try to tell them as little as possible to get them started writing documents and formulas using LaTeX. I think the big key is teaching them how to solve the problems they run into. So show them how to use the console of the text editor to find errors, and maybe show them some places to look for help if they get stumped.

    That's all I've got for right now. I'm really excited to hear how this goes and learn from your experience if we do the online course. Keep me posted!

    Posted 1 year ago #

  5. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    OK. So the computer room is booked for next week and I'm getting my handout together for LaTeX training.

    It's based around a series of exercises. The idea is that I'm not going to go through installing here: we're going to use the university computers that already have this stuff on them.

    I've uploaded the handout and I'd appreciate any advice you guys have on it. It is, of course, still unfinished, but there's plenty of stuff there already.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  6. Kevin Klement
    Key Master

    I'm crazy busy right now so didn't have time to look in any detail. I hope to later on.

    One technical thing I noticed is that you handout implies that the font sizing commands, e.g., \tiny, \large, \scriptsize, etc., work just like \textbf{..} or \textit{...}. Actually they work more like \bfseries or \itshape. You need to do {\tiny something} not \tiny{something} unless you want it to affect the entire active scope. (For beginners you might prefer to teach the environments \begin{tiny} ... \end{tiny} instead.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  7. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    Oops. How did I miss that? Thanks Kevin. So there aren't size commands that work like \textbf? I guess that's a stylistic decision: you shouldn't be changing text size on the fly like that...

    Posted 1 year ago #

  8. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    I just found out about showexpl which I might use in this handout for some things...

    Posted 1 year ago #

  9. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    I've uploaded a newer version of the (still unfinished) handout. I hope to get it finished over the weekend.

    I've learned a lot about listings and the awesome LTXexample environment from showexpl...

    Posted 1 year ago #

  10. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    Latest (and probably final) version uploaded to the website

    The class is tomorrow. Hope it goes well.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  11. Kevin Klement
    Key Master

    Looks good. Nice use of showexpl. Good luck!

    Posted 1 year ago #

  12. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    Thanks. I think it went well. A couple of typos caused some errors (ones I didn't actually mean to happen!)

    And different computers seemed to deal with images differently. Some worked only when you added the file extension (otherwise they complained that picture.pdf was missing, when it should have found picture.jpg). What size the picture displayed at if you didn't specify seemed to vary as well. On my laptop even a huge picture appears tiny, whereas I saw instances where the picture was displaying HUGE! (this was the desired effect...)

    And I didn't cover installing LaTeX since it's on the computers here. (Although I've already seen one case of it failing on a university computer this evening...)

    Full write up on the blog soon. Maybe at the weekend.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  13. Charlie Tanksley
    Key Master

    Seamus, I'm sorry I didn't comment on your handout sooner. I'm glad to hear it went well. I really liked the handout that you made. In particular, I liked your style---I thought the deliberate mistakes and 'tests' were a great way to keep the participants engaged and on their toes. I think this was probably really helpful for the people who attended: at least the handout was really nice! I'm looking forward to reading your write up in the future. Thanks for sharing the handout.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  14. Seamus Bradley
    Member

    OK. I promised a post on teaching LaTeX to philosophers, and now that term is over, I hope to get that done soon (I am travelling at the weekend and then again midweek, so I don't actually know whether it will appear before Christmas now, but we'll see.)

    Also, I broke the link above. The new link is here.

    Posted 1 year ago #

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