Are you writing a thesis? Or perhaps considering a book? LaTeX (pronounced la-tech) is a free typesetting language designed specifically for creating complex academic documents, and especially documents that include mathematical notation. LaTeX is free, powerful, cross-platform, and exceptionally stable when working with very large documents. It has long been the standard tool for writing academic articles and books in mathematics intensive disciplines---such as physics, engineering, and statistics---and a growing number of ecology journals are accepting manuscripts in the .tex format, including all of the ESA journals. Latex is not as straight-forward as a standard word processor, such as Word, but it is not difficult. This one day training session is sufficient to teach everything that is needed to write a technical manuscript in LaTeX. In advance of the workshop, I will email instructions for installing Latex. Workshop participants should bring a laptop with a latex package installed. We will use one of the many free latex software options available, such as TexShop or MikTex. In the workshop, we will work through exercises. In the process, we will typeset a complete scientific manuscript with a title page, numbered section headings, a table of contents, bold or italic fonts, double-spacing, line numbers, equations, in-line mathematics notation, references, tables, figures and dynamic references to tables, figures and equations. I will conclude the workshop with an overview of some advanced topics, including Sweave---a package that integrates “R” and latex---and bibtex---a reference management system. The course is designed for novices, but previous LaTeX users in search of new tips and tricks are also welcome.