Writing your dissertation using LaTeX

Have you been struggling with formatting examples, tables and cross-references in your dissertation? Curious if there’s a better way? Here’s a gentle introduction to using LaTeX.

Unlike MS Word and OpenOffice, LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor. Instead, you write instructions which tell LaTeX how to do the formatting. This brief introduction will get you started, even if you’ve never used LaTeX previously. You can download a LaTeX compiler, or you can use an online compiler such as Overleaf.

And as long as you’re thinking about dissertation writing, be sure to take a look at the Leipzig Glossing Rules, a.k.a. the Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (pdf).