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Something I realized too late in life is that Microsoft Word sucks. It does the bare minimum of being dead simple and accessible, but when writing longer papers with many equations, figures, and references, I found Word clunky.

I had used $\LaTeX$ for my resume starting my sophomore year, but since I relied heavily on templates, I never used it for anything else.

Upon moving to Iceland, I met a fellow engineering student named Johannes, who was a huge $\LaTeX$ nut. The university had an Overleaf account, which he wrote homework and paper templates for, and he even recreated the university logo using TikZ. I spent a good amount of time with him, and picked up his habit.

While Overleaf is a fine solution, I prefer storing my documents locally and this doesn’t take too long to set up.

Dependencies

• VSCode / VSCodium
• Tex Live
• LaTeX Workshop extension

macOS

If you don’t already have the Homebrew package manager installed, start with this:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Now install TeX Live, a popular TeX distribution:

brew install texlive

If you haven’t installed VSCode already, click the link and install it.

Next, click the Extensions icon in the sidebar and search LaTeX Workshop. Click Install, and now you should be able to click the green run icon to generate PDFs from .tex files.