Learning resources

Before buying a LaTeX textbook, count the books you already own. TeX Live 2024 ships lshort, the classic primer, in 24 language editions — English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese among them — and every one of them opens with a single texdoc lshort. On the same shelf sit the 317 pages of TeX by Topic, the 1,308-page annotated source of the LaTeX kernel, and a 481-page list documenting 20,323 symbols. This page is a map of that pile: what to read, and in what order (for where to ask, see “Community”).

The LaTeX books already on your disk

Every one of these is offline and available right now. Type texdoc followed by the word in the first column and the matching PDF opens in a viewer (texdoc lshort, texdoc symbols). Everything listed here was checked to open on a full TeX Live 2024 installation, and the page counts are read off those actual PDFs. Reading the top two entries end to end is frequently faster than reading five articles found online.

Start with lshort: “LaTeX2ε in 139 minutes”

If you read one introduction end to end, make it lshort. Its full title is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2ε, subtitled “Or LaTeX2ε in 139 minutes”. The English edition inside TeX Live 2024 is version 6.4 (9 March 2021) by Tobias Oetiker and others, and runs to 153 pages — promising 139 minutes and delivering 153 pages says something true about the book. Its origin is the interesting part. The English acknowledgements state plainly that much of the material comes from an Austrian introduction to LaTeX 2.09 written in German by Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna and Elisabeth Schlegl. “Not So Short”, in other words, was never an English book to begin with: it is the descendant of a German one. That German line still ships in TeX Live too, as l2kurz.pdf — LaTeX2ε-Kurzbeschreibung, version 3.0c, 8 April 2018.

Twenty-four language editions ship. Japanese (jlshort.pdf), simplified Chinese, Korean, German, French and Spanish are all there, along with everything from Bulgarian to Vietnamese. Run texdoc -l lshort and they appear with their language codes, your own edition ranked near the top when the locale matches. But the translations are not equally fresh. Against an English edition from 2021, the Chinese PDF was typeset in 2023, the Korean in 2021, the French in 2011, the Spanish in 2014 and the Japanese in 2015. The safe approach is two-stage: take the overall picture from the edition in your own language, and check the corresponding section of the English one whenever a detail is in doubt.

texdoc lshort        # open your local copy (your locale picks the edition)
texdoc -l lshort     # list all 24 language editions, then choose
texdoc -M -l lshort  # same list, machine-readable: name, score, path, language

What to read after lshort, in order

The principle of the order is: write, then unlearn, then look up, then look inside. First get to the point of writing a document, then drop the habits that no longer apply, then use the reference works as dictionaries, and only then go and read the implementation if you must. Following that order means that when you get stuck you at least know which layer you are stuck in. Open source2e first and what you find is not an answer, it is an implementation. The list below is ordered by what pays off when, not by popularity.

• 1. texdoc lshort — get the whole picture once. Skip this and you will not know what to look up later.
• 2. texdoc l2tabu — learn which old commands to avoid, ideally before you start reading old articles on the web.
• 3. texdoc usrguide — the author’s guide written by the LaTeX team: the official account of what the current kernel offers.
• 4. texdoc amsmath and texdoc symbols — the two required books for mathematics: how to write it, and where to find the symbol.
• 5. texdoc latex2e — the unofficial reference to consult command by command; strongest at “what were the options for this one?”
• 6. texdoc <package>, per package — read a package’s own manual at the moment you need the package. This is the shortest route there is.
• 7. texdoc clsguide and texdoc fntguide — once you are writing your own class or swapping fonts.
• 8. texdoc texbytopic and texdoc source2e — the interiors of the TeX engine and the LaTeX kernel. Rarely necessary to reach.

Old articles will hurt you: what l2tabu stops you doing

The biggest time sink in learning LaTeX is copying twenty-year-old practice into a current installation. l2tabu is the document that collects those practices in one place; its full title is An essential guide to LaTeX2ε usage — Obsolete commands and packages. The original is Mark Trettin’s German edition, and TeX Live carries Jürgen Fenn’s English translation (version 1.8.5.7, 17 June 2007, 22 pages) alongside French, Italian and Spanish editions. Old-style font commands like \bf and \it that take no argument, \centerline, superseded packages that overlap with what the kernel now does — all of these still turn up as a matter of course in articles you find by searching. Reading it takes well under an hour, and the number of accidents that hour prevents is considerable. One caveat: l2tabu is itself a 2007 document, so anything deprecated since then is not in it. For the recent changes, follow the LaTeX team’s own newsletters with texdoc ltnews.

The printed standards: Lamport, the LaTeX Companion, and the Japanese one

On paper the pair to know is “Lamport to learn it, the Companion to look it up”. LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (Leslie Lamport, 2nd edition, 1994) is the official user’s guide by the person who created LaTeX: concise, and correct about the underlying model. The LaTeX Companion (Frank Mittelbach and Ulrike Fischer, with contributions by Javier Bezos, Johannes Braams and Joseph Wright; 3rd edition, 2023, Addison-Wesley, two volumes) is the encyclopedic work covering packages and typesetting in depth. The third edition has a foothold inside TeX Live as well: all of the book’s examples ship as tlc3-examples — sources and PDFs for Parts I and II, over 1,500 files — and texdoc tlc3 opens the errata list. You can, in other words, browse the examples before deciding to buy.

For Japanese, one book is the de facto standard: LaTeX美文書作成入門 by Haruhiko Okumura and Yusuke Kuroki (Gijutsu-Hyohron). The current edition is the 9th revised edition (December 2023, about 432 pages); it runs from the basics to advanced “I want to change the layout myself” territory in a single volume, and the 9th edition strengthens its treatment of modern engines such as LuaLaTeX and of installing TeX Live. Okumura is also behind much of Japanese LaTeX, jsclasses included, so the book tracks real installations closely. If Japanese typesetting is part of the job, this is the fastest single book to have on the desk.

Learning resources online, and how to read them

Online is faster for day-to-day lookups, but get into the habit of checking the year on anything you find. For an introduction, Overleaf Learn (overleaf.com/learn) reads well, and its “Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes” is a solid on-ramp readable without an account. For breadth, the LaTeX Wikibook (en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX). For a specific question, TeX Stack Exchange (tex.stackexchange.com) almost certainly has it already. To see the common traps laid out by type, the TeX FAQ (texfaq.org) is the place, and texdoc visualfaq on your own disk is a visual index into that same FAQ — 34 pages built on the idea that you click a typeset sample and land on the matching entry. For changes to LaTeX itself the primary source is the LaTeX Project (latex-project.org); locally, texdoc ltnews follows the same newsletters. For packages the primary source is CTAN (ctan.org). In Japanese, the two hubs are the TeX Wiki (texwiki.texjp.org) and Okumura’s TeX forum (okumuralab.org/tex/).

Learning efficiently: five rules that save detours

• Read one short introduction, end to end. lshort or Overleaf Learn. Collecting fragments without the whole picture leaves you unable to tell what you do not know.
• Learn packages on demand, through texdoc <name>. A package’s own manual is always the shortest route to it.
• Learn by writing. Finishing one document teaches more than skimming three primers. When it goes wrong, read your own .log — the verbatim error is the shortest teaching material there is.
• Check the year of what you read. Practices in older posts may have been superseded. Start with texdoc l2tabu, then keep up with texdoc ltnews.
• Search when stuck; if that fails, ask with a minimal working example. The same question is usually already on TeX Stack Exchange (see “Community”).