LaTeX is a markup language (or, as said in the official website, "a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting") used to create wonderful paper and presentations. Almost all papers you will read during your career are written using LaTeX. So, let's see how it works!
There are several LaTeX distribution, you can see a complete list here.
Under Unix systems, you can install TeXLive. In particular, under Ubuntu you can type in the terminal sudo apt-get install texlive-full.
Under Windows systems, you can install MiKTeX or also TexLive.
Under MacOs, MacTex.
After the installation, you need an editor to write your LaTeX document. You can use whatever editor you want (notepad, vim, nano, gedit and so on) but i recommend you to choose Texmaker which is free and cross platform. Is also worth saying that Visual Studio Code with some dedicated extensions (such as LaTeX Workshop) is pretty good to use.
There are tons of guide on-line about LaTeX. Among them:
- A comprehensive guide can be found here.
- Another cool guide here.
- This one is perfect for beginners.
- Also here another guide.
It's also possible to write your LaTeX document on-line and share it with your collaborator using OverLeaf.
There are already lot of templates made. You can find some of them here.
To draw awesome graphs and charts, you can use the package TikZ.
Also a good site to keep in mind when facing a problem with LaTeX is StackOverflow with the LaTeX dedicated section.