LaTeX Tutorial — Lesson 1

Lesson 1: Introduction to LaTeX and Basic Syntax

Welcome to your first lesson in learning LaTeX with Crixet — your online editor for writing and compiling LaTeX documents with ease. In this lesson, we’ll introduce what LaTeX is, why it’s so widely used, and how to create your very first LaTeX document. We'll also walk through the basic syntax you'll use throughout the rest of the course.

What Is LaTeX?

LaTeX is a markup-based document preparation system. You can think of it like writing code for documents: you mix regular text with special commands (which start with a backslash \) to define how that text should be formatted.

Instead of adjusting fonts and spacing manually, you simply focus on writing. LaTeX — and in our case, pdfLaTeX — takes care of the formatting when you compile the document. This results in a professional, consistent PDF output.

Why Use LaTeX?

Here are a few reasons why LaTeX stands out:

• High-quality typesetting
  Perfect for academic papers, resumes, books, and reports with a polished, professional look.

• Great for complex content
  Handles math, tables, citations, and figures with ease — things that are cumbersome in traditional word processors.

• Automatic numbering and referencing
  Sections, tables, and equations are numbered automatically and can be referenced anywhere in your document.

• Separation of content and style
  You write once, and you can change the whole look later by swapping templates or adding a package.

• Extensibility
  Thousands of packages are available to add new features — which we’ll explore in later lessons.

Your First LaTeX Document

Let’s start by writing a simple "Hello, World!" program in LaTeX.
Paste the following code into your Crixet editor and compile it:

What’s Happening Here?

Once you compile this using pdfLaTeX on Crixet, you’ll see a clean PDF with “Hello, World!” typeset at the top of the page, complete with default margins and page numbers. LaTeX automatically takes care of spacing and layout, so you can focus purely on writing.

✅ Congratulations! You’ve written your first LaTeX document.

Basic LaTeX Syntax & Tips

Here are some important concepts to help you understand LaTeX better:

Commands

LaTeX commands begin with a backslash \ and often take arguments in curly braces {}.
Example:

→ makes bold text.

Special Characters

Some characters have special meanings in LaTeX and must be escaped to display them:

Whitespace and Line Breaks

• Multiple spaces or single line breaks in your code are treated as a single space in the output.

• To start a new paragraph, leave a blank line.

• To force a line break without starting a new paragraph, use \\ (sparingly).

The Preamble

The area before \begin{document} is called the preamble. It sets up your document, including:

• Document class

• Packages

• Global settings (e.g., fonts, margins, metadata)

We’ll expand the preamble in future lessons.

Compiling with Crixet

Crixet automatically compiles your document using pdfLaTeX, the industry-standard LaTeX compiler. That means:

• You don’t need to install anything.

• You don’t have to choose a compiler — only pdfLaTeX is supported.

• Your output is always a beautifully typeset PDF.

Just write, hit Compile, and enjoy your results.

Try This

Experiment by modifying your document:

Compile again and see how LaTeX formats the new content. Try adding your own lines, exploring how paragraphs and spacing behave.

What’s Next?

In the next lesson, we’ll look at how to structure your document with sections, lists, and paragraphs — the building blocks for writing full documents in LaTeX.

Ready to move on?
Let’s build out your document's structure in Lesson 2.