LaTeX Primer

Quick reference for writing in LaTeX, with where to look on the web for more detailed explanations (more to follow)

Symbols

When typing documents with LaTeX, the following characters are system-defined and need to be escaped:

&   %   $   #   _   {   }   ~   ^   \

These symbols are escaped as follows:

\&    \%    \$    \#    \_    \{    \}    \textasciitilde    \textasciicircum    \textbackslash

• Online LaTeX Symbols Converter — automatically converts paragraphs of texts to LaTeX with fully escaped characters.
• Accented LaTeX Characters — a, e, i, o, u etc,.
• More common LaTeX symbols — operators, relations, greek letters, accents, etc,.

Paragraphs

Bold:   \textbf{Text} — Text
Italics:   \emph{Text} — Text

Font sizes (smallest to largest):
\tiny    \scriptsize    \footnotesize    \small    \normalsize    \large    \Large    \LARGE    \huge    \Huge

• LaTeX Layout Basics — paragraphs, sections, font styles, spacing, justification, tables etc,.
• Quotation Marks and Dashes — quick guide on `, ‘, -‘s
• Line & Page Breaks
• LaTeX Hyperlinks — quick guide on how to typeset URLs in LaTeX

Acronyms

\usepackage{acronym} — simple acronym package with singular and plural support, and writing out full word / acronym management

For more advanced acronym and glossary management, use \usepackage{glossaries}.

Bibliographies using BibTeX

Preserve capitalization in Bibliography entries:   {A.B.C. TECH Ltd.}  — A.B.C. TECH Ltd.  (enclose text in .bib files using curly brackets {}. Otherwise, some .bst bibliography templates may reformat everything in sentence case undesirably)

• Using BibTeX: a short guide — introduces how BibTeX works, .bst templates, .bib files