Write Smarter with Overleaf and LaTeX

Course Overview

This course will introduce you to LaTeX, a document preparation system for creating highly customized formatted documents and Overleaf, a tool that makes writing with LaTeX much easier. LaTeX and Overleaf are particularly useful for scientific researchers who may want to write scientific manuscripts and be able to reformat the manuscript easily for different scientific journals. Unique Features of this course - Very beginner friendly approach to LaTeX which is often considered to be an intimidating subject - Guidance through starting using a template for scientific articles for a preprint archive - A relatively quick summary overview of how to use the main features of Overleaf - Some historical context Key Words Typesetting, LaTeX, Overleaf, Scientific Manuscripts, Scientific Publishing Intended Audience - The course is intended for scientific writers who might be interested in learning how to automate some of their writing formatting/layouts Note: No prerequisite knowledge is required. Learning Objectives 1. Be familiar with what LaTeX is and how it came to be 2. Understand the benefits of LaTeX and Overleaf 3. Get started writing in Overleaf with a template for a scientific manuscript 4. Add references to a document in Overleaf 5. Get help if you encounter challenges 6. Work collaboratively on Overleaf Accessibility We are committed to making our content accessible and available to all. We welcome any feedback you might have at https://forms.gle/3sTZpctxzYyhj74NA. Questions related to accessibility accommodations should be directed to https://studentserviceportal.force.com/s/. PDF versions of this course can be found at https://leanpub.com/courses/fredhutch/overleaf_intro. Overleaf is a very useful tool for collaborative scientific writing. It has an advantage over other potential collaborative writing options in that it enables for seamless changes in formatting and arrangement of text to allow you to submit to various publication platforms, such as preprint archives or scientific journals. Another advantage of Overleaf is that it is based on using LaTeX which makes it easy to add mathematical formulas to your writing. It also helps you do really complicated formatting and layouts with much more ease than other options and it makes it easy to replicate that complicated formatting/layout again for other papers or other writing products. It is widely used in certain fields like statistics and computer science. Therefore, it can also be useful to know about if you have collaborators in these fields.