The Complete LaTeX Course
A free, in-depth LaTeX course, from your first document to math, figures, tables, and bibliographies. Beginner-friendly, with runnable examples you can try online on LetX.
Getting Started: What LaTeX Is and Your First Document
By the end of this lesson you can write and compile a minimal LaTeX document.
Document Structure: Titles, Sections, and Table of Contents
By the end of this lesson you can give a document a title block, split it into numbered sections and subsections, add an abstract, and generate a table of contents automatically.
Text Formatting: Bold, Italics, Lists, and Spacing
By the end of this lesson you can emphasize text, build bulleted and numbered lists, set font sizes, and control line and paragraph breaks.
Mathematics: Equations, Symbols, and Alignment
By the end of this lesson you can typeset inline and displayed equations, fractions, powers, Greek letters, and multi-line aligned equations.
Figures and Images: Including, Sizing, and Captioning
By the end of this lesson you can insert an image, scale it, give it a caption and label, position it, and refer to it by number.
Tables: Building and Styling Tabular Data
By the end of this lesson you can build a table with aligned columns, add a caption and label, merge cells, and style it professionally with booktabs.
Bibliography and Citations: Managing References
By the end of this lesson you can store references in a .bib file, cite them in text, choose a citation style, and print a formatted bibliography.
Cross-Referencing, Footnotes, and Finishing Your Document
By the end of this lesson you can cross-reference any numbered element, add footnotes and clickable links, find the right packages, and debug common errors.
How the course works
It assumes no LaTeX at all. If you are writing your first paper, starting a thesis, or moving a document over from Word, start at lesson 1 and go in order: each lesson uses what the one before it taught.
Lessons 1 to 3 cover the document itself: the preamble, sections and the table of contents, and text formatting. Lessons 4 to 6 cover what makes LaTeX worth learning for technical writing: mathematics, figures and tables. Lessons 7 and 8 cover citations and a bibliography, then cross-references, footnotes, hyperlinks, finding packages, and debugging the errors a long document runs into.
The examples are short pieces of LaTeX you paste into a document and compile. You need only a browser: put them in a LetX project and it builds in a few seconds, or compile them with a local TeX installation (TeX Live or MiKTeX) if you have one.
When you finish, the fixes for common LaTeX errors answer what goes wrong in real documents, and the template gallery has a starting point for a thesis, a paper, a CV or slides. For the short version first, read LaTeX in 30 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Is the LaTeX course free?
Yes. Every lesson is free to read with no account, and the examples are free to compile on LetX.
How long does the course take?
About 68 minutes of reading across 8 lessons, plus the time you spend trying the examples. Most people do a lesson or two at a sitting.
Do I need to install LaTeX?
No. The examples compile in the browser on LetX. If you already have TeX Live or MiKTeX installed, they compile there too.
What should I learn after the course?
Start a real document from a template (a thesis, a paper or a CV), and keep the fixes for common LaTeX errors to hand: they cover the messages you will meet in a long document.