New Members ⇒ New LaTeX user in the Humanities

[wmamin]

Hello everyone,

I am new LaTex user. I have decided to take the plunge and try out LaTex for writing up my PhD thesis in Oriental Studies. As a humanitities student I am overwhelmed by how much information there is on this forum, but I wonder if anyone can point me to information relevant to users working in the humanities. I am able to set up a basic LaTex document but I would really like to change the fonts, incorporate transliteration for other languages (e.g. Arabic, Persian, Greek), and learn to format headings to suit my needs and likes. I'd particularly welcome if other members on this forum who are working in the humantities could share their experiences with me, and most importantly of all their tips on how to make the most out of LaTex. I am eager to learn and look forward to hearing your suggestions and your advice.

Best wishes to all,
Wahid

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome here,

you want to have different writng systems (maybe even RTL) so i recommend writing up your text with utf8-file encoding. You can use a unicode aware engine like LuaTeX. That is just another background, the LaTeX says (mostly) the same.
Make sure to load package fontspec to manage different fonts. You are not limited to fonts available with the TeX distribution, but can acces all the fonts installed on your system. A little preview is given in Issue with \input and French accents

You can use package scrlayer-scrpage to customize your headings. It is very modern.