I started using LaTeX instead of MS Word about two years ago, and I’ve never regretted the decision. I switched out of frustration because Word makes it really easy to mess up your document structure without you noticing.

Cool features LaTeX gets you

• Automatically numbered figures with references that automatically update
• Really simple bibliography management with biblatex
• Packages that help you typeset scientific things like chemistry or physics
• Professional looking output documents with very little effort
• Automation of repetitive things with macros
• It’s a plain text format, so it works well with git or other version control software
• Probably more

Installation

This guide is for Arch Linux and it’s derivatives, but you can use pkgs.org to find the mentioned packages if they’re under a different name in your distro’s package manager.

Required packages

• biber
• texlive-most, containing:
  • texlive-bibtexextra
  • texlive-core
  • texlive-fontsextra
  • texlive-formatsextra
  • texlive-games
  • texlive-humanities
  • texlive-latexextra
  • texlive-music
  • texlive-pictures
  • texlive-pstricks
  • texlive-publishers
  • texlive-science

tl;dr

# pacman -S texlive-most biber

Force XeTeX compiler with latexmk

To force latexmk to use the xelatex compiler instead of pdflatex you can create ~/.config/latexmk/latexmkrc with the following content:

$pdflatex = "xelatex %O %S";
$pdf_mode = 1;
$dvi_mode = 0;
$postscript_mode = 0;

Hello world

I have recently made another repository on my profile for template files, you can find it here on github or here on git.pipeframe.xyz. It includes a latex starting point with more commonly used packages, and other files I tend to copy from other projects

LaTeX uses a lot of auxiliary files for compilation, so it’s a good idea to create a new directory for every document. After creating a new directory, create a .tex file and open it with a text editor.

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper, dutch]{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{babel}

\bigskipamount=7mm
\medskipamount=4mm
\parindent=0mm

\begin{document}
Hello world!
\end{document}

This is the starting point I generally use for all my documents. It uses a4 paper and 2.54cm margins, which is the default in Word (in Europe). Because most of my documents are in Dutch, I add the dutch option to my document class, and import the babel package for correct word breaking and built-in latex heading translations. I also disable paragraph indenting, and modify the \bigskip and \medskip distances.

After creating the .tex file, you can run latexmk <your .tex file> to compile the document. When it’s done, you should have a new .pdf file in your directory with the same name as the .tex file.

Keep in mind that you can probably install an extension for your text editor to have it automatically compile and refresh your document for you. If you’re using Visual Studio Code, you can use the LaTeX Workshop extension, and for vim I use vimtex with coc-vimtex for coc.

Notes

LaTeX and git

Because LaTeX creates a lot of temporary files, you should add the following to your repository’s .gitignore:

*.aux
*.bbl
*.bcf
*.blg
*.fdb_latexmk
*.fls
*.log
*.out
*.run.xml
*.synctex.gz