Is there a good compendium of LaTeX exercises?

[Eclair_de_XII]

TL;DR Summary

I'm reading manuals on how to use LaTeX, but unfortunately, most of these seem to have only a few projects on which to practice the material, if any. I get that computer manuals are not textbooks, but it's a bit frustrating to learn skills in LaTeX only to have nothing to apply them to.

Do people who learn LaTeX just practice it on their undergraduate assignments or something?

 

[Wrichik Basu]

I learned $\LaTeX$ before starting as an undergraduate, thanks to lurking on PF and, before that, Physics StackExchange. I had everything set up at home. But I actually started using it in college. Submitted two very long projects in first semester, then second semester was disrupted (thanks, COVID!), and in the third semester, we have $\LaTeX$ in the syllabus itself. Most of our professors don't accept printed assignment submissions, but some do, so I complete their assignments using $\LaTeX$.

If you want to practice, a good way is to simply copy something from a book or a paper. Take the format and the data from there. Now see if you can reproduce it using $\LaTeX$. Try different document classes, like elsarticle, Revtex, etc.

Another good place to learn is the documentation of different packages.

 

[Dr.AbeNikIanEdL]

It doesn't necessarily need to be formal assignments. Typing up your own lecture notes for example can be a way to get experience at using $\LaTeX$ and the same time be the first step in revising the material (of course, you would have to try for yourself how effective that second aspect is for you, but I guess at worst it is the same as formatting some random text).

 

[Vanadium 50]

Most people use LaTeX as a tool to do their "real work", rather than learn it for its own sake. Therefore, it's very common to just look up what you need when you need it.

 

[Mark44]

Most people use LaTeX as a tool to do their "real work", rather than learn it for its own sake. Therefore, it's very common to just look up what you need when you need it.

I agree. If there's something I can't find in our own tutorial (link at the lower left of the text entry pane) or in the three or four websites I have bookmarked, I do a web search using "latex" + whatever particular thing I'm looking for.

 

[sysprog]

This CERN link is to a pdf of the Table of Contents of a guide written by Leslie Lamport, the main author of $\rm{\LaTeX}$:
https://cds.cern.ch/record/270275/files/9780201529838_TOC.pdf
The book is available on Amazon.

Some good references are listed here:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/latex/refs.html

This intro from Cambridge University is pretty good:
http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/LaTeX_intro.html

For a good sample of typesetting in $\rm{\TeX}$, upon which $\rm{\LaTeX}$ is founded, you could have recourse to $\rm{DEK}$ (Prof. Donald E. Knuth) himself:

download http://ftp.cs.stanford.edu/tex/local/lib/taocpmac.tex
copy it to your $\rm{\TeX}$ source directory
in that directory, create file: figdir.local
in that file, emplace content: \def\figdir{/home/acp/figs}​

Then you can review the source of the $\rm{\TeX book}$, which is available at https://ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex/texbook.tex
and experiment on snippets

License-related page:
https://ctan.org/license/other-nonfree
(The $\rm{\TeX book}$ source is provided under (basically) the Debian License with restriction against redistribution)

The https://ctan.org site has a wealth of $\rm{\TeX}$ and $\rm{\LaTeX}$ resources available, e.g. http://tug.ctan.org/info/latex-course/LaTeX-Course.pdf

Some other links:

http://www.math.odu.edu/gr/IntroLaTeX.pdf
http://g2pc1.bu.edu/~qzpeng/manual/latex-guide.pdf
https://www.latex-project.org/get/
https://www.latex-project.org/get/#the-latex-git-repository
https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/code/