Kyle Roth

LaTeX has a ton of different flavors, releases, and installations: MacTeX, MiKTeX, TeXworks, XeTeX, pdfTeX, LuaTeX… If you’re using Linux and just want to edit LaTeX files in Visual Studio Code and have them automatically rendered as PDFs, follow these instructions: On Arch-based distros, install the packages listed here. On Debian-based systems, sudo apt install texlive. Install some Perl dependencies: sudo cpan Log::Log4perl Log::LogDispatch Log::Dispatch::File YAML::Tiny File::HomeDir If you want to use FontAwesome on Arch-based systems, install the oft-font-awesome package and then do the following (source): sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/09-texlive-fonts.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive-fonts.conf fc-cache && mkfontscale && mkfontdir On Debian-based systems, install the font package with apt: sudo apt install texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra Install the VS Code extension called “LaTeX Workshop”. If you want to use the fontspec package and get an error saying that “the fontspec package requires either XeTeX or LuaTex”, add the magic command % !TEX program = xelatex to the top of your .tex file. If your installation needed to add some paths to your PATH but VS Code isn’t seeing them, try opening VS Code from the shell (with code path/to/workspace) so that it inherits $PATH from the interactive shell. (There might be a way to change the bin path in the settings for LaTeX Workshop, but I haven’t needed to find that setting yet.)

Matrix is a federated, open source chat system. Federation means that people can message each other across different servers, like in the image below. In that way, it works sort of like email: even though you may use you@gmail.com and I might use me@kylrth.com, we can still write each other emails. In our case, I host the server at matrix.kylrth.com, and you and I can connect to it with various clients. We can write each other messages, but we can also communicate with people on other Matrix servers.There are a ton of cool features to Matrix, such as bridging, voice and video calls, and encryption. You can read a more extensive beginner’s guide to Matrix here. Also check out the Matrix website.