Capital University Holds Workshop on LaTeX

The Department of Psychology, Capital University of Science and Technology (CUST), conducted a one-day workshop on “LaTeX” on 05/08/2021, in Lab-I, Block-M at 09:30 am-01:00 pm for faculty. About 15 participants attended the workshop. The workshop was organized by Dr. Ishrat Yousaf with the collaboration of Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization (ORIC). Dr. Ali Arshad from the department of Electrical Engineering and Computing, COMSATS Islamabad was the trainer of this workshop.

The objective of the workshop was to introduce LaTeX to the faculty for their technical writings like reports, articles, conference papers, research papers, thesis, books or dissertations, etc. The workshop would enhance the participants with their technical writing tools as per the international standards and demands. The aim was to provide hands on practice to the faculty on the aspects of doing documentation work on open source, scientific tool. Inauguration commenced with the recitation of Holy Quran, and further commenced with Welcome Note by Dr. Ishrat Yousaf. She warmly welcomed the dignitaries and participants.

The session then continued with the introduction of the trainer of the workshop Dr. Ali Arshad. He explained how LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. In his speech he talked LATEX is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing.

The topics during this session were: ‘LaTeX overview and installation”, What is LaTeX?’, ‘Why LaTeX?’ and ‘Limitations of LaTeX’ and ‘Writing a document’. He also explained basics of LaTeX including basic commands, document structure, running and viewing LaTeX.

Dr. Arshad conducted hands-on learning exercises on controlling appearance of LaTeX like numbering list, bullet point list, description list, basic text formatting (fonts, symbols, quotations, footnotes). He explained paragraphs indentation & new lines and changing font style & size. He also explained the following:
• Packages
• Environments
• Including figures
• Adding Tables
• Adding basic math building blocks & equations
• Bibliography

After completion of the hands-on session, he explained common mistakes done by LaTeX users. He ended with the importance of LaTeX, which is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right.

In concluding remarks, Dr. Sabahat Haqqani, Head of Psychology Department, stressed the importance of professional development trainings can help faculty to become better at planning their time and staying organized. She also ensured University’s consistent support to promote faculty-training workshops to foster professional development. As a token of appreciation, Dr. Sabahat Haqqani presented University souvenir to the trainer of the workshop.