latex-feedback.md

Feedback from the W17 LaTeX Workshop

• Would be good if we had people sit closer together, instead of spread out in the room. Somehow that usually creates a better. slightly more social atmosphere. It also makes it easier for people to help each other if someone gets stuck somewhere.

• The intial, inspirational remarks about how usefule, versatile and overall awesome LaTeX is were really good. You made LaTeX powerful great without making it sound dauntingly complcated. Maybe you could try to make this slightly more consiece. Since people have their laptops (i.e. a giant soruce of distraction) right in front of them, it's important to get started with the actual codealong as soon as possible!

• When you show displayed math, it might be good to show and example where you have text both before and after the equation, i.e. something like texttexttext $$mathmathmath$$ moretexttexttext to show people that everything after the equation (including punctuation) ends up on a new line in the compiled document.

• I think it would be better to demonstrate math commands inside the actual document, instead of in TexZilla. Both because TexZilla doesn't seem like a super useful tool (like DeTexify and Equation Editor are!), and because it's nice for the attendants to be able to keep the commands in their document for future reference.

• Table of contents might be unnecessary. You don't really need it for HW assignments, and if you need it for some bigger project, it's very easy to google. At the same time, it's a very nice demontration of how good LaTeX is at keeping track of side/section numbers, so might be worth to include it just because of that.

• Be sure to show the workflow of wanting to create some symbol but not knowing the right command, looking it up either through google, detexify or eqn editor and then adding the command (and, if necessary, some package) to the document.

• It would probably be good if we could give attendants some time in the end to play around with the things they have learned and ask specific questions to us/each other.

• It might be a good idea to mention something about error messages and debugging.

• Be careful about getting stuck in advanced questions. Last time someone asked some really interesting (but quite technical question) which I think went over a lot of the other attendants heads. It might be better to let questions like that wait until after the workshop.

• Like always when you do a code-along, be careful about jumping back and forth between different tabs in the webbbrowser since that easily gets confusing. Other things to be careful about: too much copy-and-paste, and too much switching between differnt projects in sharelatex (ideally, I guess we want to stick with one single sharelatex project the entire time).

• It would probably be a good idea to make some kind of small handout with a summary of what we went through and a reminder to fill out the evaluation.