Minimal LaTeX start-up document
Vincent Thorne · Posted 17 Jun 2021
A super minimal setup that will work for most LaTeX documents. Includes some examples on how to include figures and tables.
\documentclass[a4paper, 11pt]{article}
% Basic info about your document: a4 paper, 11pt font size, article style.
% Comments start with '%'.
\usepackage{graphicx} % Enables adding figures
\usepackage{subcaption} % Enables figures side-by-side
\usepackage{booktabs} % Makes nicer tables
\usepackage{geometry} % Let's you adjust the margins
\usepackage{setspace} % Let's you change the line spacing
\usepackage{hyperref} % Let's you add links (\url{<link>}) and clickable labels to naviguate through the document
\usepackage{microtype} % Improves the typesetting of your document by managing better the space between letters, hyphens etc.
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Font encoding, don't worry about this too much.
\graphicspath{
{the/path/where/tables/and/graphs/are}
{another/folder/with/stuff}
}
% Tells LaTeX where all graphs and tables are so you don't need to
% write the full path when you want to integrate them.
%-------Info---------
\title{The Title}
\date{Month Year}
\author{Author}
%-------Content--------
\begin{document}
\maketitle % Prints whatever is in the info
\onehalfspacing % Sets line spacing to 1.5 after the title for the rest of the document
\section{First section}
Some content. Super to be here, thanks for inviting me.
\section{Figures}
This section is about figures.
A figure:
\begin{figure}
\centering % makes sure it is centered
\includegraphics[width=.6\textwidth]{a_figure.png} % notice the width adjustment
\caption{A great figure}
\end{figure}
Two figures side-by-side:
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}{.49\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{first_file.png}
\caption{First caption}
\end{subfigure}
~
\begin{subfigure}{.49\textwidth}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{second_file.png}
\caption{Second caption}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{General caption} % the caption for both
\end{figure}
\section{Tables}
Directly in the document:
\begin{table}[]
\begin{tabular}{@{}lll@{}}
\toprule
Observations & $\alpha$ & $\beta$ \\ \midrule
John & 0.62 & 4.5 \\
Mark & 0.21 & 3.6 \\
Paul & 0.80 & 7.6 \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Stored in another file (cleaner: the code doesn't clutter the content):
{\small \input{path/to/a/table.tex}}
% the \small command prints everything smaller between the outter {}
% In fact, you can use \input to add any bit of LaTeX in another LaTeX file!
% Pretty useful for big documents: you'll have a "master" that loads
% all the packages and individual section files on one hand, and one
% LaTeX file per section (for example) that let's you focus on the content.
\end{document} % Don't forget this last one.