Last night, at 20h00 MUT, prior to the conference, TUG carried out an introductory LaTeX workshop. Participants could attend and chat through Zoom or stream on YouTube. Check the conference programme and join to learn more about what is happening in the TeX world.

Introductory LaTeX Workshop

Sue DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin covered quite an extensive list of features that will get someone ready to create his/her first LaTeX documents. Cheryl used Texmaker as LaTeX editor which is also what I prefer.

I learned something that might appear trivial but I did not know about it before and it could be useful in many cases; it's about the use of \label to reference \section later on in the same document. Say you have a document with two sections in which you speak about "randomness" and you want to refer to those sections in your conclusion. You could do this:

\section{Randomness}\label{sec:randomness}

I am talking about random stuff.

\section{More Randomness}\label{sec:morerandomness}

I go on talking about more random stuff.

\section{Conclusion}

Finally, I will stop talking about random stuff but I
would like you to know that I spoke about random things 
in Sections~\ref{sec:randomness} and~\{sec:morerandomness}.

At build time the ~\ref{sec:randomness} will be replaced by the corresponding section number. Afterwards, if you add other sections about the "Randomness" section, then the section numbers in your conclusion will be updated accordingly when re-building the document.

Like for example, this StackExchange (TeX) suggestion is definitely NOT recommended.

The reasons to have to modify the page margins in the middle of a document could vary; say if you need to display an almost "full-page" figure in a landscape layout, you'd surely be touching the margins and getting additional blank pages being created if you do not reduce those margins of the current page.

The simplest way I found of doing it is using the changepage package available from ctan.org. While the package provides several commands to adjust the page margins, text blocks or the entire page design, I find the below single line command extremely useful.

\changepage{〈text height〉}{〈text width〉}{〈even-side margin〉}{〈odd-side margin〉}{〈column sep.〉}{〈topmargin〉}{〈headheight〉}{〈headsep〉}{〈footskip〉

Thus, in one single line the entire page can be re-designed in the middle of your LaTeX document.

The changepage command takes nine arguments, which can either be blank or contain a value of a length. The length value is added to the current length. If a length value is not supplied then a zero value is assigned which is then added to the current length, therefore, resulting in no change. A negative value is used to reduce the current length.