LaTeX (LAY-tek or LAH-tek)

Typesets documents — Document content and document styles are kept separated

As the content and styling guidelines are kept separated, you can change any one independently of the other.

Commands → TeX engine → PDF file

Ref: Overleaf, freeCodeCamp

Installation on Windows

winget install MiKTeX.MiKTeX

On VSCode, install LaTeX Workshop extension. Install perl for free. Now,restart VSCode and write down your latex commands in a .tex file and Click the Run button on the top-right to build.

Update all MiKTeX packages

miktex-console on CMD and update from the GUI

Install a package

MiKTeX console → Update the package datebase → filter by typing the name e.g. tabularx

Commands to compile LaTeX (assuming the .tex file is sample.tex )

pdflatex sample.tex # generates .pdf file and some more files 
biber sample # generates .bbl file
pdflatex sample.tex # make use of .bbl file and correctly cites refs
pdflatex sample.tex # ensures that cross-references are updated

Options appear inside [] while arguments appear inside {}

\documentclass | selects a template

argument to \documentclass specifies the template choosing from article, report, beamer, book, letter etc. You may give options if you like.

\documentclass[twocolumn, a4paper,10pt]{article}

\usepackage | loads external package for extending functionalities

e.g. \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{graphics, amsmath}

Paragraph vs new line and spaces

A single space = new paragraph; \\or \newline for just a line break maintaining the current paragraph. You can also explicitly specify the distance with option. {} for spacing between words. \ for a single space. \quad for 4 spaces. \hspace{1in} for measured spacing

This is my first line. \\[6pt]
This is my second \LaTeX {}  line.