Summary
My own LaTeX course (5 lessons), from zero to writing your own classes, plus recommended materials and the essentials of ABNT formatting.
Why LaTeX?
Visual editors work fine until the day you need to number 40 equations, keep cross-references consistent, and format the bibliography in a journal’s exact style — then they turn into enemies. LaTeX separates content from formatting: you write plain text with markup, and the system handles numbering, table of contents, citations and professional-quality typographic layout. Every paper I submit (including the work described in Detecção de Anomalias em Dados do Gaia) is written in LaTeX.
Course — 5 lessons
- Setup & Environment — TeX Live/MacTeX, VS Code + LaTeX Workshop, Overleaf, using AI carefully.
- Basics — minimal structure, lists, figures, tables, equations, document classes, essential packages.
- Templates & Classes — class vs. template, where to find them, how to adapt a ready-made one.
- Intermediate — project modularization,
\inputvs\include, centralized metadata. - Advanced — writing your own
.sty/.cls,@makeatletter, custom environments.
After the 5 lessons: Document Models — a practical checklist per type (Thesis/ABNT, Report, Book, Beamer, Scientific poster).
đź“š Recommended materials
- LaTeX handbook — basics to advanced — PET Mecânica/UFES, free distribution (Portuguese).
- Figures and Diagrams with TikZ — Prof. Lenimar Andrade/UFPB (Portuguese).
- BibLaTeX Cheat Sheet and biblatex-abnt manual — free documentation (CTAN).
đź”— References and related
- Overleaf Learn — the best introductory LaTeX documentation out there, with runnable examples. Start here.
- abnTeX2 — the LaTeX class implementing Brazil’s ABNT standards for theses and papers. The de facto standard for Brazilian undergraduate theses.
- CTAN — the official LaTeX package repository; every package’s documentation lives here.
- Detexify — draw the symbol you want and it tells you the LaTeX command.
- Tables Generator — generates LaTeX table code visually.