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Bajczi Levente edited this page Mar 28, 2023 · 52 revisions

See also ArXiv page.

Choosing between Word and LaTeX

Check a comparison between Word, LaTeX and InDesign: http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en (source: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110133/visual-comparison-between-latex-and-word-output-hyphenation-typesetting-ligat)

BibTeX

Distributions

Windows

MiKTeX: Download from http://miktex.org/. When prompted, check the option which enables to install packages on-the-fly.

Linux

TeX Live. TeX Live is not capable of downloading packages on-the-fly (see http://www.texdev.net/2011/11/19/tex-on-windows-miktex-or-tex-live/ for details), so it is recommended to install the full package:

sudo apt-get install -y texlive-full

LaTeX symbols

Recognize hand-drawn symbols

http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Writing Hungarian documents

  • Check out the page of the Math Institute of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics: http://www.math.bme.hu/latex/

  • Make sure that your LaTeX distribution contains version 1.5+ of the magyar.ldf file. If not, download the latest one.

  • Use the following packages ensures that the reader is able to 1) search for accented characters 2) copy text from the document properly.

    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{cmap}

    If you use xetex, use the following setup:

    \usepackage{ifxetex}
\ifxetex
  \usepackage{fontspec}
\else
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage{lmodern}
\fi
\usepackage{cmap}

Using references

  • Use the \aref{} command to insert the correct definite article in the text (e.g. az 1. ábrán, a 2. ábrán).
  • The hyperref package conflicts with version 1.4 of the magyar.ldf file.
  • For using "autoref/cref-like" references in Hungarian documents, see this Gist: https://gist.github.com/szarnyasg/1a2096975932e9a4667e

Use in CI

Useful tools

Excel-to-LaTeX: Create tables faster than ever (and more maintainable)

Download: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/excel2latex Start Excel through Excel2LaTeX.xla and open your excel file. Select your formatted table and click the corresponding button under the Add-Ins (hu: Bővítmények) ribbon. And of course allow macros. Maybe you have to add LaTeX packages: bigstrut, rotating, multirow.

TablesGenerator

A bit cumbersome to use on its own (the table editor is just an HTML table, with some added convenience by a very lightweight 'formatter'). It supports multi-row and multi-column cells, as well as a custom border grid and alignments. Its main strengths are in the special options, for example:

  • Scale table to text/column width
  • Rotate table to landscape mode
  • Split table to multiple pages

Using guillemets in listings

The lstlistings package does not support UTF-8 characters. If you need to use guillemets (French quotation mark characters) in Xtend code: 1) change the guillemets to [guilleft] and [guilright] literals 2) add the following settings to the listing:

\lstset{literate=*{[guilleft]}{\guillemotleft{}}{1}{[guilright]}{\guillemotright{}}{1},}

Posters with LaTeX

See the tikzposter class: http://ctan.ijs.si/tex-archive/graphics/pgf/contrib/tikzposter/tikzposter.pdf

Listings in UTF-8

Using UTF-8 characters in listings may produce the following error:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:�\expandafter not set up for use with LaTeX.

\lstset{
	...
	inputencoding=utf8,
	extendedchars=false,
}

Note that the extendedchars key should be set to false.

Source: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/24528/having-problems-with-listings-and-utf-8-can-it-be-fixed

TikZ & PGFPlots manual

Version 2.10

http://www.texample.net/media/pgf/builds/pgfmanualCVS2012-11-04.pdf

Version 3.0

Follow this URL: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf. Mirrors for the 3.0 documentation:

Using "e.g.", "i.e." and other abbreviations without French spacing

English speaking documents don't use the \frenchspacing options. This means that every . character is interpreted as a full stop and is followed by a double space. This way, e.g. something is rendered as e.g. something. A common solution to fix this is writing e.g.\ something. However, for longer documents, this approach is error-prone, so we recommend using the following commands instead:

\newcommand{\ie}{i.e.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\Ie}{I.e.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\eg}{e.g.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\Eg}{E.g.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\etal}{et al.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\etc}{etc.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\vs}{vs.\@\xspace}
\newcommand{\viz}{viz.\@\xspace}

Update TeX Live on Ubuntu

Use the script provided at https://github.com/scottkosty/install-tl-ubuntu. You may need to reboot the machine to load the new TeX Live.

TikZiT

TikZiT is a handy tool for drawing tikz figures.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gspreemann && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tikzit

Troubleshooting

Error 131 in Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader (on both Windows and Linux), displays the following error message:

There was an error processing a page. There was a problem reading this document (131)

In my case, this was caused by an "incorrect" PNG file (included with includegraphics). I couldn't fix the PNG (using Print Screen/GIMP/...).

The possible workarounds are the following:

  • Compile the document with XeLaTeX (instead of PDFLaTeX).
  • Convert the image to PDF (e.g. print it to PDF and crop it with pdfcrop).

Syntax highlighting

For sophisticated syntax highlighting, it is recommended to use the minted package. This uses the pygments Python package. On Ubuntu, use the following command to install it:

sudo apt-get install python-pygments

The following LaTeX code works with both PDFLaTeX and XeLaTeX:

% !TeX encoding = UTF-8
% use ONE of these
% !TeX program = xelatex -shell-escape -8bit %.tex
% !TeX program = pdflatex -shell-escape %.tex
\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{ifxetex}
\ifxetex
	\usepackage{fontspec}
\else
	\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
	\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\fi

\usepackage{minted}

\begin{document}
	\begin{minted}{prolog}
    mother_child(trude, sally).

    father_child(tom, sally).
    father_child(tom, erica).
    father_child(mike, tom).

    sibling(X, Y)      :- parent_child(Z, X), parent_child(Z, Y).

    parent_child(X, Y) :- father_child(X, Y).
    parent_child(X, Y) :- mother_child(X, Y).
	\end{minted}
\end{document}

Convert to PNG

Use the standalone package:

\documentclass[convert]{standalone}

\begin{document}
$$\alpha$$
\end{document}

To convert, add the -shell-escape option:

pdflatex -shell-escape hello.tex
# or
xelatex -shell-escape hello.tex

BibTeX errors with the 2017 ACM Master template

Problem: the ACM Master template throws the following error when compiling:

! Missing = inserted for \ifnum.
<to be read again>
                   U
l.5 ...R14, AUTOSAR, DBLP:conf/ifm/LutebergetJS16}
                                                  ).

Solution: this is caused by double curly braces in an author field of the BibTeX file, for example

	author = {{AUTOSAR Consortium}},

Simply use single curly braces – the template is able to handle author names properly (and it will not invert the name as Consortium, A.).

Undefined color error by xcolor

Symptom: The build fails with the following message:

Package xcolor Error: Undefined color 'n'

Cause and solution: There is a deprecated xcolor.sty file next to the tex file. Remove it.

Import single character from font package

The \mapsfrom (↤) symbol in stmaryrd gets translated to ←[ when copied from the text with the cmap package activated. If you think this is unacceptable, you can use use the \mapsfrom character from the stix package. To import this character without the entire (quite heavy) stix package, follow the instructions at Stack Exchange:

\DeclareFontEncoding{LS1}{}{}
\DeclareFontSubstitution{LS1}{stix}{m}{n}
\DeclareSymbolFont{arrows1}{LS1}{stixsf}{m}{n}
\DeclareMathSymbol{\mapsfrom}{\mathrel}{arrows1}{"AB}

Include .cls file from parent directory

Including \documentclass{../template/mytemplate} from parent directory causes the following warning. In certain cases the .cls file is not included at all (e.g. in makisyu/texlive-2020 Docker image).

LaTeX Warning: You have requested document class `../template/mytemplate',
               but the document class provides `mytemplate'.

Possible solutions:

  • \input@path
\makeatletter
\def\input@path{{../template/}}
\documentclass{mytemplate}
\let\input@path\@undefined  % restore search path if needed
\makeatother
  • TEXINPUTS=../template:$TEXINPUTS pdflatex myfile (source)
  • \subimport from import package, details: 1, 2, 3
  • filter warning

Diff tool

  • latexdiff package:
    • See description.
    • Use --flatten to also compare included .tex files.
    • Copy figures (of the new version) to the folder of the diff.
    • Example: latexdiff --flatten ../old/ms.tex ../new/ms.tex > diff.tex

Cleaner

See here.

Cloning from Overleaf

When cloning from Overleaf, git will request your password for every push/pull operation. To store the password, run:

git config credential.helper store
Clone this wiki locally