LaTeX Training & Consultancy

(I am currently unable to take on freelance and consultation work; sorry!)

Learn LaTeX with Lim Lian Tze, active contributor to the Malaysian LaTeX User Group blog and author of several university thesis LaTeX templates and presentation themes.

I provide affordable training and consultancy services related to LaTeX typesetting and design on a freelance basis, with knowledge sharing as the driving principle.

Drop me a line at liantze @ gLILYmail • com (Remove the flower and use a proper dot) for further information or a quotation. Preview demo sessions can be arranged. Questions about LaTeX problems are also welcome.

Consultancy Services

Training Courses

The following on-site training courses are available. Please contact me for quotation and course arrangements.

Training courses on other themes can be tailored according to the clients' requirements.

List of Clients

Read some testimonials!

The Linux Foundation
(Consultation on document preparation system)
NAv6, Universiti Sains Malaysia
(Introductory Training Workshop, January 2012)
FCSIT, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
(Introductory Training Workshop, June 2012)
SAMME, University of South Australia
(Manuscript preparation consultancy)
MALINDO 2012
(Certificate design & production)
SoC, Universiti Utara Malaysia
(uumthesis consultancy)
Consumers International
(LaTeX class customisation)
Al-Andalus Legal Consulting
(Book index processing and typesetting)
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
(GayaUKM consultancy)
Institute of Engineering Mathematics, Universiti Malaysia Perlis
(Introductory Training Workshop, April 2014)
NUSA: Linguistic studies of languages in and around Indonesia
(nusaart.cls class creation)
Nanyang Technological University
(LaTeX for Linguists Workshop, Mar 2015; Introductory Workshop at IGS, Jun 2016; at SCSE, Sep 2016; Overleaf/LaTeX talk at GSC, Sep 2016)
Centre for Graduate Studies, National Defence University of Malaysia
(upnmthesis consultancy & training, March 2016)
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Malaysia
(Training workshop, March 2016)

Consultant’s Profile

I received my B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom in 2001. My first formal training/teaching role was as an IT Trainer at the Warwick University Student Union. After working with University Tenaga Nasional, Selangor, as a tutor/assistant lecturer, I relocated to Penang and received a M.Sc. (Computer Science) from USM in 2004, specialising in machine translation and machine-readable dictionaries. I have completed my thesis in natural language processing for a PhD degree from MMU, Cyberjaya. Currently I am Community TeXpert at Overleaf, as well as writing a weekly Chinese column about LaTeX for LaTeXstudio.net.

My LaTeX-related experiences include:

Why LaTeX?

LaTeX is widely used in academic and scientific publishing. It is the submission format of choice (or mandatory) of many journals, including ACM, IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, INFORMS and Oxford. Books prepared with LaTeX have been published by John Wiley & Sons, Academic Press, MIT Press, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Springer and many others. It is also used at NASA and the US Office of Naval Research.

Examples of LaTeX output: beautifully typeset text, mathematics, chemistry, circuit diagrams, linguistics trees, chess game records and more.LaTeX is capable of producing documents of professional typesetting quality. It is especially suited for books and documents with complex structures and mathematical material. There are also packages for creating special material for physics, chemistry, life sciences, computer science, engineering, linguistics, law, social sciences and humanities.

Thanks to the content-style separation principle inherent to LaTeX, an author can concentrate wholly on the content while writing an article. A LaTeX style file would ensure the publisher’s or organisation’s house style guidelines are adhered to consistently and correctly. This would typically include all sectioning headings, page headers and footers, figure and table captions, and (perhaps best of all) citation and bibliography entries.

LaTeX takes plain text as input and produces (amongst other forms) PDF outputs. This makes LaTeX useful in situations requiring batch-generation or compilation of documents from data.

LaTeX is also free (both as in free beer and free speech) software. It is available at no charge for all major platforms, including Windows, GNU/Linux, the Mac and various *nix flavours.

See a brief history of TeX for more background information.

Why Get a Trainer or Consultant?

While free LaTeX-related tutorials and references abound on the Internet, many online resources are now out-of-date, and most go little beyond the most rudimentary ‘Hello World’ examples.

A training workshop, designed and led by an experienced trainer, would ensure a more wholistic learning syllabus. Working with a trainer in a workshop setting, with hands-on sessions, is a very useful opportunity where all learning problems can be addressed on the spot, as soon as they occur.

I also personally believe the impromptu experience-sharing by the trainer, stimulated by the particular questions raised during a workshop, is the best ‘added value’ of training workshops over following online tutorials on one’s own.

On the other hand, if your organisation is interested to go down the LaTeX path for documentation and project purposes, a consultant can help ease the transition and learning process in the early days. The consultant can help design solutions, while helping your organisation getting more proficient with LaTeX itself.

Who would be Interested?

  • University lecturers and researchers
  • Postgraduates
  • Final year undergraduates
  • Book designers and publishers working with technical material
  • Company or organisation doucmentation managers
  • Software developers looking for tools for document batch-generation
  • Anyone interested in coding and creating beautiful documents!