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I was challenged to make a small 2-3 hours workshop of LaTeX for my fellow PhD students (STEM field). I do not consider myself a LaTeX power user but I've spent my fair time playing with LaTeX but I'm not sure that my approach was the best way to learn it. For that reason I would like to know your opinion about the best way to introduce LaTeX for people that never played with LaTeX before. What are the most important and relevant topics to show to PhD in the STEM field. I guess learning how to use LaTeX for writing their thesis is important and for that reason talking about biblatex is important. Also writing a CV with biblatex integration to easily update their literature will be something interesting. Do you guys have any suggestion on a couple of exercises to make or any materials from previous workshop that are available online. Thank you

  • I've added the tag [teaching]. There are some questions here labeled with that tag -- search on this (with the brackets around the term) and there may be some useful ideas, although most questions with this tag aren't really recent. – barbara beeton Nov 10 '19 at 21:58
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    2-3 hours isn't enough unless the students are already using LaTeX. You've tagged the question Biblatex. If you're running a workshop on Biblatex specifically, 2-3 hours is fine. https://github.com/cfr42/latex-1-2 includes a 2 hour Biblatex workshop, along with several other 2 hour workshops and a day-long introductory workshop. – cfr Nov 11 '19 at 00:04
  • @barbarabeeton What about the biblatex tag? That's at least 2 hours in itself, in my experience :). – cfr Nov 11 '19 at 00:05
  • @cfr -- I chose to "ignore" the biblatex tag since it wasn't even mentioned in the question text. (Agreed that 2-3 hours is barely enough to introduce the associated vocabulary.) – barbara beeton Nov 11 '19 at 00:24
  • I think PhD students are interested only in how to write their thesis, you should start from here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/409658/class-for-my-thesis-i-am-a-beginner-just-installed-latex-which-document-clas and here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/461457/what-would-you-include-in-a-short-what-is-latex-and-why-should-i-use-it-prese – CarLaTeX Nov 11 '19 at 04:56
  • @cfr I've just added the biblatex because as it was mentioned by CarLaTeX most PhD students care about writing their thesis and paper. I was also thinking about writing a CV that integrates with a .bib file and they can easily update their CV bibliography –  Nov 11 '19 at 10:45
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    @cbornes -- The reasoning for adding the biblatex tag is solid, but the connection isn't obvious unless it's also mentioned in the question text. If you add that, it will be a much better question. – barbara beeton Nov 11 '19 at 14:51
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    In addition, some idea of what the students know already is crucial. As I say, I have a 2-hour workshop on Biblatex, but those students have already done at least 6/7 hours on LaTeX generally. – cfr Nov 11 '19 at 18:27
  • Incidentally, the workshops I linked are all aimed at postgraduates, primarily PhD students. – cfr Nov 11 '19 at 18:28

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