LaTeX Quickstart

About

Hi, and welcome to 21-128! The purpose of this site is to help you get setup with \(\LaTeX\) (also known as TeX), the go-to standard for academic typesetting and the primary way you'll be turning in homeworks for this class! Unlike most document editors that you've probably used before, like Word or Pages, \(\LaTeX\) is a compiled document format, meaning that, after typing up a document, you have to pass it to an external program (called the compiler) before getting your final result. While this initially might seem somewhat annoying to setup and use (especially compared to more visual editors), this workflow actually gives you a lot more power over how your document is formatted and displayed, which is incredibly important for typesetting math. Given it's ubiquity through academia, then, we hope that this guide will be helpful not just within the scope of this class, but throughout the rest of your career at CMU.

With that said then, at the end of this tutorial, you should have everything ready to go for your first homework assignment! In particular, throughout this tutorial, we'll take you through installing and setting up a \(\LaTeX\) distribution, setting up an editor, and basic math typesetting.

If you've already installed a TeX distribution, feel free to skip ahead to editor setup. Otherwise, let's get started with installation!

Install LaTeX Get started with editor setup