With OneLatex, creating a professional-looking LaTeX document is easier than ever – even if you’ve never worked with LaTeX before.

By following these three simple steps, you’ll go from setting up your workspace in OneNote to generating a ready-to-use PDF:

1. Create your Initialization Page

   Set up a OneNote page with all the settings and LaTeX packages you’ll need for your document.

2. Write your content

   Add your chapters, sections, and text directly in OneNote. Don’t worry about formatting — just focus on getting your ideas down.

3. Create your final document

   Convert your OneNote content in OneLatex and export it as a LaTeX file or a ready-to-use PDF.

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OneLatex also uses four background colors in OneNote to mark settings, packages for the LaTeX preamble, remarks, and LaTeX commands — you’ll learn more about these below.

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Step 1: Create a OneNote page for Initializiation purposes

During the conversion process from our OneNote notebook via LaTeX to PDF using OneLatex, there are two types of instructions that influence our output document:

• OneLatex Settings: These control how OneLatex converts our notebook into a LaTeX file. For example, they define image handling, table formatting or quotation style. And they can be adjusted dynamically at any point in the notebook. ➡️ see substep b)
• LaTeX Packages: These are passed to the LaTeX compiler and determine how the final PDF is rendered. For instance, they enable mathematical symbols, change the font family or improve layout behavior. We set them once and then they are applied to the whole document. ➡️ see substep c)

It is recommended to place the definition of both elements on a dedicated page at the beginning of our notebook section. This will serve as the initialization basis for the entire document.

Let’s start by creating that initialization page in our notebook and go through the three substeps:

a) Create a OneNote page for Initializiation

It is recommended that you create a page for initialization purposes at the beginning of your OneNote notebook:

The prefix %[N] (N stands for “No title”) tells OneLatex that the page name should not be shown in the output document. The actual name of the page is not important. But it makes sense to choose a clear naming as “Initialization”.

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There are also two other prefixes for OneNote page names: %[W] (stands for “Without numbering”) and %[R] (stands for “Remark”). ➡️ Learn more about title prefixes in OneNote page names here.

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Once you’ve created the Initialization Page, we move on to b) and c), where we’ll fill it with the settings and the content for the LaTeX preamble.

b) Copy settings to the Initialization Page

For our test document, we’ll start by using the existing default settings in OneLatex. To do this, navigate to the Settings section in OneLatex and copy all settings to the clipboard: