FABRIZIO IOZZI

I have created five short videos as a basic introduction to LaTeX. What follows is a complement to the videos.

Overleaf is online and its basic version is free. This makes it the obvious choice for the beginner.It is also useful for the experienced user who works more online and with collaborators than alone. Overleaf also offers synchronization with many cloud services so you can work online keeping a copy of your work in your own repository.

However, if you want to work on your files on your computer, there are free editors and compilers for Windows, Linux and Mac. The main source for everything about LaTeX is

http://tug.org/

the website of the Tex Users Group Organization. On the menu on the right of the homepage you can find links to Tutorials and TeX Software. TUG maintains Tex-Live which is a LaTeX distrubion (that is, a compiler) that works in all three major operating systems. Overleaf itself uses Tex-live. TUG maintains also CTAN

https://www.ctan.org/

the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network which is a repository of packages, distributions, documents all about LaTeX.

For Windows users, the standard compiler is Miktex

https://miktex.org/

which features also an editor, called Texworks. For Mac, there is Mac-Tex

http://www.tug.org/mactex/index.html

and here too there is an editor, called Texshop. Linux users are generally well experienced so they don't need further suggestions :-)

If you want an alternative cross-platform editor, you may try

Texstudio,  https://www.texstudio.org/

or

Texmaker, https://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

Finally, if you want to know more about LaTeX the usual starting point is the

(Not so) Short Introduction to LaTeX

(of course, part of CTAN)