Volume 53, Issue 3 —— Summer 2026
Alex Threlkeld, Kayleigh Bohemier, and Sam Hansen
In this session, Kayleigh Bohémier, Sam Hansen, and Alex Threlkeld presented on LaTeX instruction in academic libraries. In part, this session presented work on an forthcoming sequence of articles detailing case studies of LaTeX instruction at a variety of institutions, edited by Bohémier, Willow Dressel, and Cay del Junco, and to which Hansen and Threlkeld contributed. The presenters shared their experiences with LaTeX instruction at their institutions, although a full treatment will appear in the upcoming article series. The session also briefly introduced the basic motivations for using LaTeX and common tools for writing in LaTeX, particularly Overleaf, and aimed to show that there is a lower barrier to entry in providing LaTeX instruction than many librarians realize. In particular, Overleaf provides an intuitive interface, avoids setup issues due to being cloud-based, provides comprehensive and easy-to-read documentation, and offers streamlined integrations with other tools such as Dropbox and Zotero that makes collaboration, version control, and bibliographic management straightforward.
In response to questions, there were discussions on approaches and challenges to creating accessible documents using LaTeX, with many of the challenges arising due to the common standard of sharing final documents in pdf format, where other formats, particularly html, play better with screen readers. There were also discussions on the attractiveness of LaTeX to humanists, and more generally markup languages and WYSIWYM (“What You See Is What You Mean,” as opposed to “What You See Is What You Get”) text editors, who may find useful the ability to “just write” afforded by the separation of content and style, but may not have given serious consideration to moving away from WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Educational LaTeX memes were also shared.