Latex tips

This page contains a few tips for those who want to start writing papers in Latex.

General tips

• Use the package url and command \url to typeset URLs. This ensures that they are line wrapped correctly. If a different font is required, use \urlstyle{sf} or similar.

• For typesetting tables, use the package booktabs. Remember that printed tables should never have vertical lines.

Fonts

• By default, LaTeX uses a bitmap version of its default font (which is called Computer Modern). Because the bitmaps have fairly low resolution, the result will look bad when professionally printed (although it may look ok on you laser printer). A bigger problem is that many PDF viewers (including the popular Acrobat Reader) will antialias the font when viewed. Although the intention is to make your document look better, it results in a mess like the following:

  

  To solve this, you need to figure out how to make LaTeX use the Postscript version of the Computer Modern font. On my system, this happens when I run pdflatex instead of latex, but you may have to do something different on your system.

• You may want to use the Times font instead of Computer Modern, for instance because the conference you are submitting to requires it or because you think that the computer modern font is too thin and difficult to read. You do this by adding the following two lines to the preamble of your document:

  \usepackage{times}
  \usepackage[bigsym]{mathptm}
  

  The first line makes LaTeX use Times for regular text. The second line makes LaTeX use the Times and Symbol fonts for math, except for large symbols (summation, integration, etc.) which look funny in the Postscript Symbol font.

These two tips (as well as the image) were taken from Sean Luke's Doing LaTex right, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

Figures

• Don't use the epsfig and psfig packages; they are outdated, and you will get into all kinds of problems. Instead use the graphicx package, and use the command \includegraphics to include your figures.

• When using \includegraphics, give the filename without the .eps extension. Then, you can use epstopdf to convert your EPS files to PDF files, and use pdflatex to compile a PDF version of your paper.

• Draw your figures to scale. It is possible to draw larger figures and scale them down, but then the fonts will also be scaled down. You can compensate for this by increasing the font size in the figure, but unless all your figures are of the same size, this will lead to different font sizes in the different figures. In gnuplot, you can use the command set size to reduce the size of the graph. A value around 0.65 is usually appropriate for a one column wide graph in a two-column paper.

• Make sure the text in your figures are consistent, and large enough to be readable. Text in figures should never be smaller than the font used for footnotes in your paper.

• Don't generate your graphs by typing commands into gnuplot by hand. Instead, write a shell script for each graph. The data can be included in the shell script, or the script can read them from a separate file. The benefit of this is that you can easily make minor changes to your graph, such as changing the size or font. If you make your graphs by hand, you will never have time for this, and your paper will look ugly.

Typesetting math

• Mathematical operators, such as function names, should be set in roman type, not italics. Latex already has commands for some operators, including \max, \min, and \log. To define your own, define the command \newoperator as follows:

  \providecommand{\newoperator}[3]{%
    \newcommand*{#1}{\mathop{#2}#3}}
    

  Here is an example that defines \FD as an operator:

  \newoperator{\FD}{\mathrm{FD}}{\nolimits}
    

Squeezing

Here are some things you can try in order to make your paper fit within the page limit:

• \renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{0.98}
• \titlespacing

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Last updated: 2007-06-10