Introduction to LaTeX

I gave a presentation on LaTeX on 23rd November 2017 at IIM Indore – my home college. I claim to be no expert on the subject as this presentation was aimed at just kindling the spark amongst the students for them to start experimenting with it, and in more general sense, to encourage them to learn skills off the books.

I learned LaTeX last summer during my internship project with Prof Pritam Ranjan, IIM Indore. In the report, I had to use a lot of matrices, determinants, and fractions, with many subscripts and superscripts. It was too complicated for me to find the exact symbol, then put variables in order, etc. Even when I got them, I needed to align them separately! Also, it was too complicated to enter a matrix of dimension more than 3×3. What to do? LaTeX was his answer.

I started learning it. Some YouTube videos, some extra cups of coffee and snacks and voila! I was getting the hang of it. Using LaTeX saved me a lot of time and of course, increased my productivity. If he wouldn’t have given me a chance and the idea, I too would be just another person muddling with Word to get a document straight. So yeah, he is the person to whom I dedicate all this. Heartfelt and sincere thanks, sir!

Amongst various fantastic takeaways from this internship, learning LaTeX was a unique one. Lately, I also realized that LaTeX could not only compliment my regular Microsoft Word usage but could even replace it entirely. These days, I have started making presentations, CV and Resume too on LaTeX – all for a simple reason – it is smooth and beautiful.

Now, I am quite a fanatic for LaTeX and if the document size exceeds a page, LaTeX is the resource to go for. A small pun: Nawaz Sharif was recently ousted from his post (see this). The primary evidence against him was the use of Calibri font of Microsoft Word (see this).

“However, the declaration, dated February 2006, was typed in the Calibri font, which was not introduced until 2007 – raising suspicions that the document may have been forged.” – Independent, UK.

So see, Microsoft changed their default font, and Nawaz Sharif got convicted. Had he been using LaTeX, he would be happily enjoying his tenure (and perhaps vacations)!