Completing a postgraduate degree takes patience, stubbornness, and a lot of different skills. Some are easy to find out about, while others can feel like a real struggle. That’s where my YouTube channel comes in! Over time, I’ll be adding to various playlists to help you get to grips with all of the skills you need as a trainee scientist. I will also be gradually adding audio-visual versions of all my written guides to help those who prefer the audio format.
Series 1: LaTeX for Scientists
Some things are just easier to learn from tutorials than books, and coding is one of them. Since LaTeX is the most important coding language you will need to learn, we’re starting there! No matter what language you write your manuscript in, or what programming language you use for your data analysis, your advisor will likely want you to do the write-up in LaTeX. Honestly? It’s a million times better than trying to write a dissertation or thesis in Word. These guides are meant to help you get quickly confident with all the LaTeX code you need in STEM, even if you’ve never used it before!
Click here for the LaTeX for Scientists support page, which will give you access to all the code produced in the series. Clicking on the thumbnail images will take you to the video on YouTube. Each tutorial has timestamps in the video description corresponding to the contents list below, so if you only want to know about something specific, you can look it up here and save some time.
Tutorial 1 – Quick-start Guide contents:
- Introduction to Overleaf
- How LaTeX files work
- File handling in Overleaf
- How main.tex is structured
- Line-by-line breakdown of the default “blank” template
- About encoding packages
- Creating a title
- Placeholder text using Lipsum
- Creating and using additional files
- Margin control with Geometry
- Table of contents with clickable/colour links
Tutorial 2 – Maths for Beginners contents:
- Introduction
- Setting up: creating a new file, calling math packages
- Math method 1: the “Equation” environment (including labelling/referencing)
- Hot tip #1: suppressing equation numbers
- Math method 2: the “Inline” environment
- Subscript, superscript
- Definitions (creating your own commands)
- Hot tip #2: Manually controlling spacing
- Fractions
- Hot tip #3: non-derpy brackets
- Matrices
- Hot tip #4: Aligning matrices
- Hot tip #4 (cont.): Aligning equations
- Aligning equations worked example
- Formatting text
- Making it gorgeous!
- Bringing it all together: Full worked example
Tutorial 3 – Figures contents:
- Introduction
- Step 1: Calling the “graphicx” package
- Step 2: Uploading an image to Overleaf
- Step 3: The figure environment and how to use it…
- …The “centering” command
- …The “includegraphics” command
- …The “caption” command
- …The “label” command
- Step 4: Controlling the size of your image
- Step 5: Positioning the image (a.k.a. bullying the compiler)
- *bonus tip* Creating a list of figures
- *bonus tip* Adding short captions for the list of figures
- *bonus tip* Figures in two-column mode