name: title class: title, middle

LaTeX tips

Alex Hernández-García (he/il/él)

.turquoise[Rolnick Lab · Montréal · Oct. 27th 2021]

.center[ ]

.footer[alexhernandezgarcia.github.io

alex.hernandez-garcia@mila.quebec

@alexhdezgcia]

Citations

\citep{} and \citet{}

natbib provides handy commands and great functionality for handling citations:

\usepackage{natbib}

\citep{} and \citet{} allow to correctly integrate citations within a sentence:

• \citep{darwin1859origin}: parenthetical citation (Darwin, 1859).
• \citet{darwin1859origin}: textual citation, as Darwin (1859).

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Pro tip: you can tweak the details of citations, for example:

\RequirePackage{natbib}
\setcitestyle{authoryear,round,citesep={;},aysep={,},yysep={;}}

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Further reading:

• Overleaf documentation on natbib

Citations

Clean organisation of the bib entries

• I keep one references.bib for each research line that I use in all papers, reports, thesis, etc.
• I use comments to organise the references.bib file in sections per topics.
• It is a good practice to use a consistent style for the IDs. I use firstauthorYEARtopic. Google Scholar uses firstauthorYEARfirstwordtitle.
• It is a good practice to keep a consistent style for the entries:
  • Authors enumeration
  • Force case with double curly braces: `` to force uppercase AI.
  • Names of conferences

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.conclusion[Do as you wish, but mostly be consistent]

Cross-references

Different parts of a document can be identified with the command \label{id} and referenced elsewhere with \ref{id}

• I like to keep labels consistent and organised to avoid duplicates
• I use a different prefix for each type of content:
  • \label{sec:results}
  • \label{fig:results-summary}
  • \label{tab:results-summary}

Cross-references

cleveref for improved references

cleveref improves standard references with extra features, such as:

• The reference includes both label and number instead of just the number:
  • as shown in \cref{fig:results}: “as shown in Figure 3”
• The label becomes part of the hyperlink
• Smarter handling of multiple labels:
  • see \cref{eq:th1,eq:th2,fig:results-summary}: “see Eqs. (1) and (2) and Figure 3”
• Even ranges:
  • see \crefrange{eq:1}{eq:4}: “see Eqs. (1) to (4)”

Further reading:

• Documentation on CTAN
• texblog.org

Colours

LaTeX’s default colours are bad for you and your readers, but that’s easy to fix:

• \hypersetup{citecolor=MidnightBlue}: to set the colour of hyperlinks with hyperref
• Define colours and set defaults with xcolor:

\usepackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{highlightblue}{rgb}{0.435,0.659,0.863}
\hypersetup{citecolor=highlightblue}

Using colours is a great idea for highlighting text during paper writing, for example different authors may have different colours, etc.

Miscellaneous

• Do not forget to punctuate equations!
• \usepackage{blindtext} allows to easily generate dummy Lorep ipsum content, with \blinddocument, \blind{itemize}[3], \blindmathpaper, etc.
• \usepackage{comment} allows to easily comment out blocks of content with \begin{comment} and \end{comment}.
• Make a good use of h, t, b !, etc. to position figures and tables (to read more)
• Markdown and LaTeX are a happy marriage!
• There is of course a lot more to learn about LaTeX:
  • The Overleaf documentation is great.
  • I took inspiration from this tweet by Dustin Tran
  • Writing beautifully in LaTeX

LaTeX for big documents

Theses, reports, long papers, etc.

One of the main advantages of LaTeX is that we can easily separate style and content. Keeping this philosophy in mind while writing LaTeX documents will save us time and help us focus. Usually we have style.sty files for specifying all style and format details, and content.tex files to include our content.

Having content as plain text enables version control, handling lightweight files and makes collaboration and sharing easy.

For long documents these features become particularly important. I took good advantage of them for my PhD thesis, which is available on GitHub.