Kenneth Hellevang

LaTeX for Agricultural Extension Professionals

LaTeX is a free open source document preparation system for professional quality documents and presentation materials. Extension professionals, trying to reach their audience though various forms of printed and online resources, can benefit from the vast potential of LaTeX. Using LaTeX empowers the extension professionals to create their own documents from start to finish, with good timing and exceptional qualities. This article describes the typesetting process, obtaining and installing LaTeX, creating and running a simple document, creating a scientific journal paper as an example though a template, and other advanced features suitable for extension publications. Such advanced features as side-by-side and wrapped figures, background figures, minipages, oral presentation slides, conference posters, books, and newsletters that use appropriate LaTeX classes and packages were explained with examples, commands and principles involved. Sections of fully functional LaTeX codes and graphics to reproduce generated outputs were presented. Although there is some learning involved to use LaTeX, the benefits may outweigh the effort. With experience, professionals can create more sophisticated documents, automate several aspects of document preparation, and make it easy for others to use by creating templates. The impact of extension activities through publications might be ensured through the timely and professional quality output of LaTeX, as the role of typesetters can be eliminated and the authors can directly produce high-quality final output.