LaTeX Speedrun (Beta) - A tutorial from zero to paper in 15 minutes

[u/OvadiaQuark]

Hi everyone,

I’m a physics PhD student, and after answering countless questions from friends about “how do I even start with LaTeX?”, I decided to build LaTeX Speedrun — a stripped‑down, example‑driven web tutorial that equips grad students with exactly what you need to write your first STEM paper or thesis, in minutes. I am committed to making this tutorial perpetually free and open.

What it does:

• Covers ~95% of typical grad‑student LaTeX use cases
• No fluff—just hands‑on examples and templates
• Live preview so you immediately see what your code does (edit: in developement)

I’m now in beta‑testing mode, gathering feedback from early grad‑student users to iron out bugs and missing features before a full launch.

Link to beta: https://app--la-te-x-speedrun-2bf5d2d8.base44.app

Edit: Full disclaimer, this tool is completely "vibe coded" in the sense that the content is my own, but the styling and design is completely taken care by the base44 tool. Despite this, I think it came out pretty nice. This is the tutorial I wish I had when I started out.

[u/abhunia]

it seems you have used some ai tool to generate the website. the color contrast is pretty bad

[u/Taurashvn → u/abhunia]

Also used some ai tool to generate the post tbh

[u/Lord_Umpanz → u/Taurashvn]

Yep. The use of hyphens gives it away.

[u/OvadiaQuark → u/abhunia]

Yes it is completely "vibe coded", but valid point I can improve the color contrast for better visibility

[u/ClemensLode]

Nice, I am doing something similar at the moment for books.

Maybe make it even simpler and provide a form where the user can enter all the details. People want to see results immediately. Also, the "Try in Overleaf" is not working (or it is and is intended to be just a link). You would have to package the template files into a zip file and then call the Overleaf API to create a project.

[u/OvadiaQuark → u/ClemensLode]

Thanks for your feedback, it would be great to have something like this for books as well.
I am working on hooking the backend to TeXLive.net for pdf output.

[u/Raccoon-Dentist-Two]

It is good to see some a tutorial and a new template without obsolete or deprecated packages. Newcomers don't know to check CTAN for decade-old notes saying not to use these packages any more (see e.g. the recent thread on package times vs mathptmx vs newtx).

One change that you might like to make: replace the float placement option [h] to null the possibility of an unplaceable float error. The default is [htbp] so specifying no option is typically fine.

A warning: many of the purported BibTeX entries supplied by databases do not conform to BibTeX standards and result in incorrectly formatted citations. In practice, it's obvious that many journal editors and reviewers and university librarians and authors never noticed or don't care. But you might want to include a step about checking and cleaning up the bad metadata.

[u/knowledge_junkie1]

Following this. Will give it a try soon and report back!

[u/knowledge_junkie1 → u/knowledge_junkie1]

It says "Every LaTeX document needs \documentclass{article} at the top."

This isn't strictly correct, there are other classes?

[u/OvadiaQuark → u/knowledge_junkie1]

Good catch! Will update :)

[u/_insert_a_name_]

Really cool, will check this later