I Was Told to Write My Thesis in LaTeX. Here's How I Actually Got Started.

My advisor’s email said: “Please submit your thesis in LaTeX format.” I had two reactions: first, mild panic — I’d never written anything in LaTeX. Second, the overconfident thought that I could figure it out over a long weekend. Spoiler: the weekend came and went. I was still staring at a wall of compile errors I couldn’t parse. Three Attempts, Three Failures Attempt 1: MacTeX + TeXShop I downloaded MacTeX (the full 5GB installation — took forever), opened the bundled TeXShop editor, pasted in a sample document, hit compile, and got this: ! LaTeX Error: File `amsmath.sty' not found. Spent an hour searching Stack Overflow. The suggested fix was to run tlmgr install amsmath in the terminal. Ran it. Got a different error. Gave up. Attempt 2: VSCode + LaTeX Workshop People on Reddit swore by this setup. So I installed VSCode, installed the LaTeX Workshop extension, copied a settings.json snippet from a blog post, and managed to compile a basic document. Then I tried to write Japanese text