$\LaTeX$ Syllabus

For the past 15 years, I’ve been teaching chemistry classes as the local community college. Once of the challenges was finding a utility to easily format equations, chemical formulas, problem sets and orbital diagrams etc.

In this case word or many of the other WYSIWYG utilities never really cut it. When I started teaching 15 years ago, I was always wrestling with Word to format my tests and problem sets and they never quite looked write.

When I went back to school for my computer systems engineering degree, I was introduced to and haven’t looked back. Latex is a document typesetting system that enables you code a document in using the $ \TeX $ and $\LaTeX$ languages and compile it into a published document. It’s available for free at https://www.latex-project.org/

The Windows version is available at https://miktex.org/

I’ve written $\LaTeX$ template that I use for the template of my course. The original document is just a plain old text document that I then compile with the pdflatex utility to build the pdf file. The template is available at https://github.com/tdean1991/latex-syllabus-template

For example, here is an example of a dimensional analysis problem and written in the typesetting language and the final formatted version.

\begin{equation}56.6 \: \cancel{g \: Ca} \times \frac{1 \: \cancel{mol \: Ca}}{40.08 \: \cancel{g \: Ca}} \times \frac{1 \: \cancel{mol \: Ca_3N_2}}{3 \: \cancel{mol \: Ca}} \times \frac{148.26 \: g \: Ca_3N_2}{1 \cancel{mol \: Ca_3N_2}} = 69.8 \: g \: Ca_3N_2\end{equation}

(1)  

Or for formatting chemical equations

\ce{CO2 + C -> 2 CO}
\ce{Hg^2+ ->[I-] HgI2 ->[I-] [Hg^{II}I4]^2-}

Or for electron configuration diagrams:

begin{MOdiagram}[names,labels,style=square,distance=6cm]
\AO(50pt){s}[label={$1s$}]{0}
\AO(50pt){s}[label={$2s$}]{1}
\AO(50pt){p}[label[x]=$2p_x$,label[y]=$2p_y$,label[z]=$2p_z$]{2;up,up,up}
\end{MOdiagram} \begin{MOdiagram}[names,labels,style=square,distance=6cm]
\AO(50pt){s}[label={$1s$}]{0}
\AO(50pt){s}[label={$2s$}]{1}
\AO(50pt){p}[label[x]=$2p_x$,label[y]=$2p_y$,label[z]=$2p_z$]{2}
\AO(50pt){s}[label={$3s$}]{3}
\AO(50pt){p}[label[x]=$3p_x$,label[y]=$3p_y$,label[z]=$3p_z$]{4;up,up,up}
\end{MOdiagram}

There is a learning curve to it but I’ve found that more and more IDEs are supporting the language.

For further information I would recommend: