LaTeX in 2020, recently I have had to write some white papers. While looking I learned about LaTeX. After some research I decided to use it. You might ask why use this antiquated technology in the era of MS Office, Google Docs, and the plethora of other word processors available.

Firstly, LaTeX files are plain text, they are stored with and managed by the same GIT repository as any other code. This allows for close collaboration, revision control, and a plethora of other benefits.

Secondly, LaTeX files are themselves future proof, as they are based on an open source compiling engine, plain ASCII text, and very mature, anything written in LaTeX will always be readily and easily viewable. Microsoft Office, Coral, and the rest make periodic updates to their file extensions that make older legacy files unviewable.

Thirdly, LaTeX being based off of TeX, offers a much higher quality of typesetting than would otherwise be available with other document formats. When the document presented is of a high stakes nature, this quality of rendering adds a nice touch to the completed product.

Because of this I decided to learn to create my documents in LaTeX. Setting up an environment in Ubuntu was simple, as running the following command to install TeXStudio and the LaTeX and TeX compilers.

With that said, I scoured the web to find some code snippets. I have posted them on GitHub after tweaking them to work in a stand alone manner.