LaTeX notes

Notes for using Tex and related things like Latex. In practice I access latex through pandoc commands.

See also: textfiles, pandoc

General Resources

Installing

Debian

The full TexLive (texlive_full) distribution is very big, so installing the subset that includes latex, the texlive package, is probably wise. When using funny unicode symbols when making pdfs with pandoc Xetex (texlive-xetex package) is very helpful

Citations

Insert a citation with cite{citationID}, where citationID is the identifier in a BibTeX (.bib) bibliography file. The .bib is defined somewhere in the LaTeX file with bibliography{~\user...\bibfile.bib}.

There are other, improved implementations for citations, such as natbib.

Currently there is an error in the Zotero export filter for .bib files (parentheses and brackets are sometimes reversed when abbreviations and special characters are present). Open bibtex in vim and do:

:%s/)\}/\})/c

Citation Resources

Making Tables

It may be easier to make and format the table in a spreadsheet first, and some spreadsheets can export tables directly to LaTeX format. Gnumeric, and Libre Calc (using Calc2LaTeX) do a decent job, but there will still be formatting to make it look nice. Table data can also be pasted into this website to generate latex formatted tables. Once you have some data to format into a LaTeX table, this is the traditional way to do it:

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
A & B & C\\
\hline\hline
foo & bar & baz\\
\hline
zab & rab & oof\\
\hline
\end{tabular}

Depending on the table, a nicer/easier way could be to use the Booktabs package, and do something like this:

\begin{tabular}{ccc}
\toprule
A & B & C\\
\midrule
foo & bar & baz\\
zab & rab & oof\\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Mathematical typesetting

TeX/LaTeX excels at this. Mathematical statements or formulas are generally placed between dollar signs. Here are a few resources:

Comments, TODOs, and other document annotations

Comments can be added to a Tex or latex document with the % signifying the beginning of a comment. If a document is reviewed by another and they add these types of comments, they will be picked up by a diff between the original and the patch.

A couple other ideas

Converting to Word/LO formats

Pandoc should do this, or...