Recently I explored the \(\LaTeX\) as I am starting to work on my MSc research. And yes, I am falling into love with it, because of its simplicity , elegant look and the easy to format - or may be I am an engineer, coding all the day.

I found several free ways to use it.

One is to use Overleaf, it is a standard tool these days. It can be used if you are working with other collaborator but most of advanced features are bundled with premium package. It good to have a look at it and start straightaway.

But in my case I want to keep a track of the file versions and ability to work offline. So I searched for ways to set it up on my machine. Fortunately there is good mixture with latex,vs-code and git which provides my initial requirements. One bad thing we have to install packages ourselves, but worth the effort I think.

Installing

There is no rocket science here. Just got to mactex which is the flavor of latex for MacOS. Next get the Latex workshop extention added to the VS code editor. And you might need to upgrade perl and its packages using brew and cpan. I had to resolve few issues with formatter.

Learning

It is easy. Just check this 30-minute guide on overleaf and play with it a little bit, it is just another scripting language. You can find various types of templates on Overleaf. Just download, open in vs-code and compile. Simply play with it, you can learn. It took me only few hours while writing the literature review.

Blogging

Then I wanted to know how to add latex math to my jekyll site. It is even simpler. Just follow https://cullaloe.com/render-latex-in-jekyll/ and you can add mathematics formulas in latex style with the help of katex bundle.

Look at this, isn’t it beautiful?

\[ \binom{n}{k} = \frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!} \]

\(\LaTeX\) is cool tool, I am sure it is good to add it to your tool box.