Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

All software used in this course is freely available for every standard operating system.

Upon successful completion of the class a student will be able to:

• successfully install LaTeX and its related components on a home/personal computer;
• use LaTeX and various templates acquired from the course to compose Mathematical documents, presentations, and reports;
• access CTAN and other resources to obtain additional LaTeX packages.

Assessment must include:

• weekly document assignments

Assessment may also include:

• portfolio of templates (e.g. letter, homework assignment, etc.)
• in-class group work
• cumulative assignment
• level-specific assignment (e.g. lab write-up for MTH 251)

Addressing each course outcome:

• successfully install LaTeX and its related components on a home/personal computer: students are required to submit a LaTeX document with its output. This establishes successful installation.
• use LaTeX and various templates acquired from the course to compose Mathematical documents, presentations, and reports: Submitted weekly assignments are used to gauge this outcome.
• access various resources, such as http://ctan.org, to obtain additional LaTeX packages: At least one assignment requires students to use online resources; explicit guidance is purposely omitted from that part of the lesson so that students will need to research and use these resources first hand.

1. Set-up and compiling options
   • installing LaTeX and related software, and an integrated development environment
2. Basics
   • inline and displayed math content
   • title, author, date, maketitle, fancyhdr
   • font sizes and styles, page sizes, line spacing (using geometry package)
   • itemize, enumerate
   • font modification: \bfseries, \itshape, color, etc.
   • interpreting .log files
   • fixing mistakes
   • commenting
   • online resources such as ctan and tex.stackexchange
3. More advanced documents
   • advanced equations and alignment environments from the amsmath and mathtools packages
   • labeling and referencing equations
   • units with siunitx
   • hyperlinks in pdf files (using hyperref package)
   • multicols
   • sectioning commands, table of contents, list of figures, list of tables
   • new commands
   • beamer class for presentations
4. Figures and tables
   • floats
   • tables, booktabs package
   • including pictures and figures (.bmp, .jpg, .eps, etc.)
   • captions (including customization with the caption package)
   • minipages
   • homemade graphics using either pgfplots, tikz, or pstricks
5. Optional content
   • automation tools (e.g. arara)
   • new environments, counters, theorems
   • subfigure, subtable, longtable
   • installing new packages and updating existing packages
   • latex2html
   • refcheck (using refcheck package)
   • batch/bash files
   • bibliography (using biblatex or biber)
   • index and/or glossary