This tutorial will walk you through creating a simple $\LaTeX$ document that showcases some of the commonly used functionality.

Emacs setup (optional)

Emacs has great $\LaTeX$ support. Install the Auctex package with M-x package-install RET auctex RET. If you like autocomplete and use CompAny, install the Auctex backend as well (company-auctex).

Starting a document

A document starts with a document class declaration. To start an article, for example, you would use this:

\documentclass{article}

The actual document content is contained inside of document markup, like so:

\begin{document}
\end{document}

Sections

Start a new section with the \section{} markup:

\section{Why EMACS is Technically Capitalized}

Labels

Labels allow you to reference places or figures in the document. Place a label like so:

\section{Why EMACS is Tecnically Capitalized}
\label{sec:emacs-capitalized}

References

Reference a label with the same test used when the label was created:

Blah blah blah \ref{sec:emacs-capitalized}.

Footnotes

Footnotes are automatically numbered, and put at the bottom of a page:

Foo bar baz \footnote{buf bum} bar baz foo.

Citations

Assuming you have a BibTex file set up, citations are done with the cite markup:

This is a sentence \cite{pitts2020}.

Appendix

To generate a plain appendix if you have a bibliography file called foo.bib:

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{foo}

A sample document with all the elements can be found here.