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The Overleaf LaTeX tutorial, put together by our co-founder and CTO Dr John Lees-Miller, has helped many users learn the most useful LaTeX constructs for writing academic papers, reports and theses.

Available in three parts, it offers practical hands-on guidance with examples that you can work through to build your confidence and expertise in LaTeX.

Part 1 of the tutorial covers the basics, including typesetting text and basic mathematics material.

In Part 2 we go over some of the most important features of academic writing in LaTeX, such as structuring your document with sectional headers; adding images, figures, tables; automatic cross-referencing; and citations and reference lists.

Parts 1 and 2 would equip you quite well for most report- and paper-writing, but if you’d like to go the distance, head over to Part 3 to learn how to create presentation decks with the beamer package, and produce graphics for your LaTeX document with the powerful TikZ package.

The tutorial is open-sourced under the MIT license, and you can download the source here. In fact, it has been forked and translated (and expanded upon) into different languages:

• Brazilian-Portuguese
• Italian
• Spanish
• Simplified Chinese

If you have translated the tutorial into your own language, let us know and we’ll be happy to add it to the list here!