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LaTeX is a document creation tool, widely used in academia and science. It allows creating documents as code: you first write your document using the LaTeX markup language, and then generate documents (usually in the PDF format). These documents are well formatted, clean and easy to modify. They can contain all kinds of symbols, formulas and special characters.

When I decided to write an article about probabilities 101, LaTeX quickly proved to be a viable solution, and even the only one I found. Indeed, while some websites allow writing mathematical formulas and generating images containing them, this approach makes it a burden to make any modification.

The main resource I used to learn writing LaTeX documents is the Overleaf documentation, which is an online LaTeX document creation service.

I also extensively used the LaTeX for beginners white paper.

For mathematical symbols, I turned to https://oeis.org/wiki/List_of_LaTeX_mathematical_symbols

For images:

I used the latexmk too to generate my PDF document from my .tex source. On Mac OS, there are many ways of installing it. The two ways that retained my attention are:

  • the MacTeX bundle, containing several tools - mainly GUIs
  • using Homebrew, the Mac package management system: brew install imagemagick && sudo tlmgr install (untested)

Two commands specifically helped me:

# recompile a document into PDF every time it changes
latexmk -pdf prob-101.tex -pvc

# delete temporary files
latexmk -c

After using LaTeX for this article, I would not only use it again but recommand anyone to use it whenever you need to generate PDF documents.