latex tips and tricks for thesis writing

because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

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LaTeX Theses and Dissertations

LaTeX Theses and Dissertatons

Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX here

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Getting Started with Your Thesis or Dissertation

How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

You can upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

How to Write your Thesis/Dissertation in LaTeX: A Five-Part Guide

Five-Part LaTeX Thesis/Dissertation Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

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Writing Tips

7 LaTeX Tips for Writing Your Thesis or Dissertation

$7 LaTeX Tips for Writing Your Thesis or Dissertation$

4-minute read

30th January 2022

LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) is a system for document preparation widely used in mathematics, science, engineering, and linguistics. It allows you to create beautifully presented academic work and is especially useful when you need to include formulas, footnotes, bibliographies, or tables of contents.

LaTeX provides ready-made commands for formatting so that users can focus mainly on the content of their academic writing.

In this post, we’ll share our top tips for creating complex LaTeX documents professionally:

Choose a LaTeX editor
Decide on a template
Follow a tutorial
Break up your main file into smaller ones
Use % to insert comments
Learn to understand error logs
Have a professional proofread your LaTeX document

Read on to learn how to best use these tips.

1. Install a LaTeX Editor, or Access Online

As LaTeX files are plain text, they can be created in any text editor (like Notepad), but it’s easier to manage long documents if you use specialized LaTeX editing programs like TeXmaker, TeXworks, or Overleaf .

To make the code easier to read, these tools show the text in different colors. They also have features like auto-complete commands and a PDF viewer so you can see what your final document will look like.

2. Select a Suitable Template

With LaTeX, you don’t have to worry about layout. Simply pick a template for the type of document you’re writing (e.g., a resume or a thesis).

If your university doesn’t provide you with one, you can look online for free templates. Most LaTeX editors come with standard templates.

3. Start With a Tutorial

If you’ve never used LaTeX before, you should start with a tutorial to familiarize yourself with the basic commands and learn how to import packages to get more features.

A short tutorial will teach you enough to write a simple LaTeX document. Once you get more advanced, though, you might need more commands. You can probably find everything you need with a quick Google search.

4. Split Your Document Into Multiple Files

Your thesis or dissertation is probably the longest document you’ve had to write in your academic career so far. With LaTeX, you can split your main file into smaller chunks.

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For a thesis, this would normally mean creating a separate .tex file for each chapter. With the commands \input or \include, you can insert these files into your main file.

5. Use the “%” Command to Insert Comments

If you’re a programmer, LaTeX probably comes naturally to you. But for others, it’s tough to look at multiple pages of code at once. This is where “%” comes in handy.

Any text you type after the % symbol won’t appear in the final document. So, you can use “%” to remind yourself what a particular section of code does, or as a way to find your way around:

{\ small text} % small font size

You can also use “%” to “switch off” some of your text lines. This is handy if you want to debug your document, as you can easily switch them back on if needed.

6. Find Out What Error Logs Mean

It’s helpful to learn the meaning of standard error logs so you can easily fix simple errors. An error log looks like this:

[filename]:[line number where error occurs]:[description of error].[incorrect content]

If you can’t easily identify the error, you can contact experienced LaTeX users by joining an online community like TeX—LaTeX Stack Exchange .

7. Expert LaTeX Proofreading

Although most LaTeX editing programs include a basic spell checker, you still need to have your work proofread by a LaTeX expert. Our team at Proofed is experienced in handling .tex files, so your LaTeX documents are in good hands with us.

You can even put our service to the test by sending us 500 words for free proofreading .

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Research Guides

Submit and publish your thesis.

The Graduate Thesis: What is it?
Thesis Defences
Deadlines and Fees
Formatting in MS Word

Formatting in LaTeX

Making Thesis Accessible
Thesis Embargo
Review and Release
Your Rights as an Author
Re-using Third Party Materials
Creative Commons Licenses for Theses
Turning Thesis into an Article
Turning Thesis into a Book
Other Venues of Publication

For formatting instructions and requirements see the Formatting section of the School of Graduate Studies website. The thesis style template for LaTeX ( ut-thesis ) implements these requirements. You are not required to use the template, but using it will make most of the formatting requirements easier to meet.

►► Thesis template for LaTeX .

Below are some general formatting tips for drafting your thesis in LaTeX. In addition, there are other supports available:

Regular LaTeX workshops are offered via the library, watch the library workshop calendar at https://libcal.library.utoronto.ca/
With questions about LaTeX formatting, contact Map and Data Library (MDL) using this form
There are also great resources for learning LaTeX available via Overleaf

Many common problems have been solved on the TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange Q & A Forum

LaTeX Template

To use the LaTeX and ut-thesis , you need two things: a LaTeX distribution (compiles your code), and an editor (where you write your code). Two main approaches are:

Overleaf : is a web-based platform that combines a distribution (TeX Live) and an editor. It is beginner-friendly (minimal set-up) and some people prefer a cloud-based platform. However, manually uploading graphics and managing a bibliographic database can be tedious, especially for large projects like a thesis.
A LaTeX distribution can be installed as described here . ut-thesis can then be installed either: a) initially, with the distribution; b) automatically when you try to compile a document using \usepackage{ut-thesis} ; or manually via graphical or terminal-based package manager for the distribution.
The LaTeX distribution allows you to compile code, but provides no tools for writing (e.g. syntax highlighting, hotkeys, command completion, etc.). There are many editor options that provide these features. TeXstudio is one popular option.

Occasionally, the version of ut-thesis on GitHub may be more up-to-date than the popular distributions (especially yearly TeX Live), including small bug fixes. To use the GitHub version, you can download the file ut-thesis.cls (and maybe the documentation ut-thesis .pdf ) and place it in your working directory. This will take priority over any other versions of ut-thesis on your system while in this directory.

LaTeX Formatting Tips

Here are a few tips & tricks for formatting your thesis in LateX.

Document Structure

Using the ut-thesis document class, a minimal example thesis might look like:

\documentclass{ut-thesis} \author {Your Name} \title {Thesis Title} \degree {Doctor of Philosophy} \department {LaTeX} \gradyear {2020} \begin {document} \frontmatter \maketitle \begin {abstract} % abstract goes here \end {abstract} \tableofcontents \mainmatter % main chapters go here % references go here \appendix % appendices go here \end {document}

►► A larger example is available on GitHub here .

You may want to consider splitting your code into multiple files. The contents of each file can then be added using \input{filename} .

The usual commands for document hierarchy are available like \chapter , \section , \subsection , \subsubsection , and \paragraph . To control which appear in the \tableofcontents , you can use \setcounter{tocdepth}{i} , where i = 2 includes up to \subsection , etc. For unnumbered sections, use \section* , etc. No component should be empty, such as \section{...} immediately followed by \subsection{...} .

Note: In the examples below, we denote the preamble vs body like:

preamble code --- body code

Tables & Figures

In LaTeX, tables and figures are environments called “floats”, and they usually don’t appear exactly where you have them in the code. This is to avoid awkward whitespace. Float environments are used like \begin{env} ... \end{env} , where the entire content ... will move with the float. If you really need a float to appear exactly “here”, you can use:

\usepackage{float} --- \begin{ figure}[H] ... \end {figure}

Most other environments (like equation) do not float.

A LaTeX table as a numbered float is distinct from tabular data. So, a typical table might look like:

\usepackage{booktabs} --- \begin {table} \centering \caption {The table caption} \begin {tabular}{crll} i & Name & A & B \\ 1 & First & 1 & 2 \\ 2 & Second & 3 & 5 \\ 3 & Third & 8 & 13 \end {tabular} \end {table}

The & separates cells and \\ makes a new row. The {crll} specifies four columns: 1 centred, 1 right-aligned, and 2 left-aligned.

Fancy Tables

Some helpful packages for creating more advanced tabular data:

booktabs : provides the commands \toprule , \midrile , and \bottomrule , which add horizontal lines of slightly different weights.
multicol : provides the command \multicolumn{2}{r}{...} to “merge” 2 cells horizontally with the content ... , centred.
multirow : provides the command \multirow{2}{*}{...} , to “merge” 2 cells vertically with the content ... , having width computed automatically (*).

A LaTeX figure is similarly distinct from graphical content. To include graphics, it’s best to use the command \includegraphics from the graphicx package. Then, a typical figure might look like:

\usepackage{graphicx} --- \begin {figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=.6 \textwidth ]{figurename} \end {figure}

Here we use .6\textwidth to make the graphic 60% the width of the main text.

By default, graphicx will look for figurename in the same folder as main.tex ; if you need to add other folders, you can use \graphicspath{{folder1/}{folder2/}...} .

The preferred package for subfigures is subcaption ; you can use it like:

\usepackage{subcaption} --- \begin {figure} % or table, then subtable below \begin {subfigure}{0.5 \textwidth } \includegraphics[width= \textwidth ]{figureA} \caption {First subcaption} \end {subfigure} \begin {subfigure}{0.5 \textwidth } \includegraphics[width= \textwidth ]{figureB} \caption {Second subcaption} \end {subfigure} \caption {Overall figure caption} \end {figure}

This makes two subfigures each 50% of the text width, with respective subcaptions, plus an overall figure caption.

Math can be added inline with body text like $E = m c^2$ , or as a standalone equation like:

\begin {equation} E = m c^2 \end {equation}

A complete guide to math is beyond our scope here; again, Overleaf provides a great set of resources to get started.

Cross References

We recommend using the hyperref package to make clickable links within your thesis, such as the table of contents, and references to equations, tables, figures, and other sections.

A cross-reference label can be added to a section or float environment using \label{key} , and referenced elsewhere using \ref{key} . The key will not appear in the final document (unless there is an error), so we recommend a naming convention like fig:diagram , tab:summary , or intro:back for \section{Background} within \chapter{Intro} , for example. We also recommend using a non-breaking space ~ like Figure~\ref{fig:diagram} , so that a linebreak will not separate “Figure” and the number.

You may need to compile multiple times to resolve cross-references (and citations). However, this occurs by default as needed in most editors.

The LaTeX package tikz provides excellent tools for drawing diagrams and even plotting basic math functions. Here is one small example:

\usepackage{tikz} --- \begin {tikzpicture} \node [red,circle] (a) at (0,0) {A}; \node [blue,square] (b) at (1,0) {B}; \draw [dotted,->] (a) -- node[above]{ $ \alpha $ } (b); \end {tikzpicture}

Don’t forget semicolons after every command, or else you will get stuck while compiling.

There are several options for managing references in LaTeX. We recommend the most modern package: biblatex , with the biber backend. A helpful overview is given here .

Assuming you have a file called references.bib that looks like:

@article{Lastname2020, title = {The article title}, author = {Lastname, First and Last2, First2 and Last3 and First3}, journal = {Journal Name}, year = {2020}, vol = {99}, no = {1} } ...

then you can cite the reference Lastname2020 using biblatex like:

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex} \addbibresource {references.bib} --- \cite {Lastname2020} ... \printbibliography

Depending on what editor you’re using to compile, this may work straight away. If not, you may need to update your compiling command to:

pdflatex main && biber main && pdflatex main && pdflatex main

Assuming your document is called main.tex . This is because biber is a separate tool from pdflatex . So in the command above, we first identify the cited sources using pdflatex , then collect the reference information using biber , then finish compiling the document using pdflatex , and then we compile once more in case anything got missed.

There are many options when loading biblatex to configure the reference formatting; it’s best to search the CTAN documentation for what you want to do.

Windows users may find that biber.exe or bibtex.exe get silently blocked by some antivirus software. Usually, an exception can be added within the antivirus software to allow these programs to run.

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Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX here

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How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it – nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced PDF, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see other tutorial videos if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

Add Institutional Library contact info here.

Contact Overleaf or email [email protected]

5-part Guide on How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX

5-part LaTeX Thesis Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

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Link your ORCiD account to your Overleaf account.

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Next: Using Templates on Overleaf >>
Last Updated: Aug 20, 2024 5:29 PM
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Best practice and tips & tricks to write scientific papers in LaTeX, with figures generated in Python or Matlab.

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Tips and tricks for writing scientific papers.

Table of contents

What is this?

One sentence per line, capitalization, keep references whole, number formatting, define custom commands, use the correct notation for columns et elements, environments, back references, one script per data-driven figure, python helper script, figures format, rasterize parts of the figure, useful resources.

This repository contains a list of tools, best practices, tips and other guidelines we found useful/important when writing scientific papers. Some are a matter of style (we tend to follow the guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style), and we are well aware that other people prefer to do things differently, but we list them anyway to have a consistent guide. Feel free to adapt, change, ignore, or even challenge everything we write!

Typesetting your paper

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging the types, i.e., letters and symbols. It is mostly a question of a aesthetics, but beautiful typography makes documents easier and more pleasant to read, helping the reader to get to the message.

We list below some typesetting tips and tools to help you when composing your documents. Some tips are specific to LaTeX, but others apply regardless of what you are using.

When writing LaTeX documents, put one sentence per line in your source file. Write:

The main reason for this is source control and collaboration: when looking at the changes of a commit, it is much easier to identify what sentence was changed if they are each on their separate line. Your coworkers will thus be able to see the changes more easily.

Another benefit is that you will be able to better identify errors when only given a line number by our LaTeX compiler.

We will refer below to two types of capitalization:

sentence format : The title of the nice book
title format: The Title of the Nice Book

Use title format for all section, subsection, etc. titles. In order to help you capitalize the right words, there's a handy website: capitalizemytitle.com .

Sometimes, the name of an object (such as Figure, Table, Graph, or Algorithm) and its reference number are split into two lines. For instance, the name of the object may be on one line, while the reference number appears on the next line.

To ensure that LaTeX keeps both the name of the object and its reference on the same line, you can use the character ~ between the object and the reference. By using the tilde character ~ in this way, you can avoid awkward line breaks and maintain a consistent formatting for your object names and reference numbers in LaTeX documents.

To ensure that you don't forget to use the tilde character, you can simplify the process by creating custom commands for automation. Here's an example:

Once these commands are defined, instead of writing:

simply type:

(complete example)

booktabs can help you produce clean and nice-looking tables.

In general, avoid using vertical lines in your tables. Instead, if you want to group columns, do it in the headers using \cmidrule . You can also replace horizontal lines with spacing, using \addlinespace .

Column heads should use sentence-format capitalization (see http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/15/ch13/ch13_sec019.html ).

You can find more advice on table formatting here: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/markusp/teaching/guides/guide-tables.pdf . Here is a nice GIF that illustrates some of these rules:

Use the siunitx package to format all numbers, currencies, units, etc:

You can also use it to round numbers:

Finally, it can help you better align numbers in a table:

Mathematical notation

When writing equations, it is helpful to have a coherent and consistent way of writing variables, vectors, matrices, etc. It helps the reader identifying what you are talking about and remembering the semantics of each symbol.

We propose the following rules for writing math:

lowercase italic for variables: x ( $x$ )
lowercase italic bold for vectors: x ( $\mathbold{x}$ )
uppercase italic bold for matrices: X ( $\mathbold{X}$ )
uppercase italic for random variables: X ( $X$ )

The \mathbold command comes from the fixmath package and is similar to \boldmath or \bm , except that all symbols are in italics, even greek letters (other packages do not italicize greek letters).

When adding indices or exponents to variables, make sure that you add them outside of the styling of the variable, i.e., write $\mathbold{x}_i$ and not $\mathbold{x_i}$ .

Because we often refer to variables, we suggest defining the following two commands:

You can then use $\vec{x}$ and $\mat{X}$ in your document. If you decide to change the way you want to format matrices, you simply have to change the \mat command, and it will update the whole document.

We also suggest defining commands for the variables you use the most. For example, if you use \vec{x} and \mat{X} a lot, consider defining these commands:

You can then write more compact equations: $\vx^T \vy = \vZ$ .

Note that you should always style the variables with respect to their type. For example, the $i$th element of a vector \vx is x_i and not \vx_i (it is a number). Similarly, if you have a matrix \vX , can call its i th column \vx_i (it is a vector, thus in bold) and one if its element x_{ij} , not \vX_i and \vX_{ij} .

Use $...$ to write inline equations. You can also use $...$ , but it is a TeX command and gives more obscure error messages.

To write centered equations on their own lines, do not use $$...$$ (it is one of the deadly sins of LaTeX use ). It works, but gives wrong spacing. Use \begin{equation*} or \begin{align*} instead.

Bibliography

For longer documents, such as a master or PhD thesis, it can be useful to have back references in the bibliography, to show where a reference was cited. To do so, simply add the option backref=page to the hyperref package:

You can customize the way the back references appear with the following commands:

Creating figures

Figures are an important component to any paper, as they can communicate your results to the reader. You should consider what the information on each figure tells your reader, and that there is just enough information to support your message, not more. For example, if you want to show patterns in 2d points (there are two clusters well separated), it is unnecessary to put ticks and values on the axes (the scale does not really matter)? Figures should not be too complex. It is better to have several figures conveying one or two messages, (method A is better than B, but converges slower) than having one big messy figure.

Some figures are hand-made, e.g., to explain a system or give a global picture, whereas others are data-driven, i.e., illustrate some data. These data-driven figures should be scripted as much as possible: ideally, if your data changes, you should only have to run a script once to update your figure, without any other intervention (setting the view, zooming, saving/cropping the figure, etc). Similarly, if the data required to generate a figure takes more than seconds to be produced, you should have a first script that computes and saves the data, and a second script that plots it. This way, you will save a lot of time when working on the plot: you won't have to wait after each small change to the figure to see its effect.

We also recommend to save the command used to generate a figure in the LaTeX file, for example as a comment above the figure, especially if the script requires arguments.

If possible, all figures should use the same fonts for their labels, axes, etc. In particular, you should not have one figure with big labels/ticks, and another with smaller ones. One solution to achieve this is to define the size of your figure in the script that generates it, and not rescale it in your document (e.g., do not change set the width of the figure to \textwidth in your LaTeX document).

To have consistent figures, we recommend using a helper script, similar to our plot_utils.py . Using this script, you simply have to call the figure_setup() function to define all the sizes, then create a figure of the size you want, and save it.

We recommend saving all figures in the EPS format. This way, you can use both latex and pdflatex to generate your documents, and enjoy beautiful vector graphics and texts.

As of September 2015, on Mac OS X and with up-to-date versions of Python, Matplotlib and TeX Live, there is a loss of quality when printing figures that were directly saved as PDF from Matplotlib. It becomes clearly when printed on real paper; try it out for yourself. This is another reason to prefer saving Matplotlib-generated pictures in EPS . If you really want to keep only a PDF version of the figure, use the epspdf command line tool---the resulting PDF will be better than that directly produced by Matplotlib.

For completeness, note that there is another Matplotlib backend, PGF , that produces slightly superior results. However, as of September 2015, the resulting PDFs are twice as heavy as those obtained with the default backend and epspdf .

Matplotlib, even when using tight layout features , adds at times too much white space in the margins. A nifty command-line tool to crop a PDF to its tightest bounding box pdfcrop .

If you have many data points in your plot, the resulting EPS file might be very big. You could save your figure as a PNG file, but this would result in blurry texts. The solution is to rasterize parts of your figure, i.e., to tell matplotlib that the data points have to be rendered as a bitmap in the EPS file, while the rest is in vector format.

You can pass the rasterized=True keyword to most plotting fuctions in matplotlib . You can also use different layers using the zorder and tell matplotlib to rasterize all the layers below a given zorder using the set_rasterization_zorder() method of the axis. See figure_rasterized_example.py and http://matplotlib.org/examples/misc/rasterization_demo.html for examples of rasterization.

Automatically capitalize your title: https://capitalizemytitle.com
Chicago Manual of Style: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org
Command-line check of weasel words, passive, etc: https://github.com/devd/Academic-Writing-Check
An essential guide to LaTeX 2e usage: http://ctan.math.utah.edu/ctan/tex-archive/info/l2tabu/english/l2tabuen.pdf

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How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it—nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced PDF, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf.

We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library , and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files.

We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos if not), and focus on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

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Getting Started Common Elements Mechanics Technical Text Special Pages Special Documents Creating Graphics Programming Miscellaneous Help and Recommendations Appendices
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Getting Started

Common Elements

Mechanics

Technical Text

Special Pages

Special Documents

Creating Graphics

Programming

Miscellaneous

Help and Recommendations

Appendices

•

1 Always writing LaTeX in roman
2 id est and exempli gratia (i.e. and e.g.)
3 Grouping Figure/Equation Numbering by Section
4.1 Vector image editors with LaTeX support
4.2 Graphs with gnuplot
4.3 Generate png screenshots
5 Spell-checking and Word Counting
6 New even page
7 Sidebar with information
8 Hide auxiliary files

Always writing LaTeX in roman

If you insert the \LaTeX command in an area with a non-default font, it will be formatted accordingly. If you want to keep LaTeX written in Computer Modern roman shape, you must redefine the function. However, the naive

will output:

So you need to create a temporary variable.

does not work either.

We must use the TeX primitive \let instead.

id est and exempli gratia (i.e. and e.g.)

If you simply use the forms " i.e. " or " e.g. ", LaTeX will treat the periods as end of sentence periods (i.e. full stop ) since they are followed by a space, and add more space before the next "sentence". To prevent LaTeX from adding space after the last period, the correct syntax is either " i.e.\ " or " e.g.\ ", or else " i.e., " and " e.g., " with a comma. The comma is interpreted by LaTeX as part of a sentence, since the period is not followed by any space. In this case, " i.e., " and " e.g., " do not need any special attention. The latter style is favored, e.g., by The Chicago Manual of Style .

If the command \frenchspacing is used in the preamble, the space between sentences is always the same as that between words.

Grouping Figure/Equation Numbering by Section

For long documents the numbering can become cumbersome as the numbers reach into double and triple digits. To reset the counters at the start of each section and prefix the numbers by the section number, include the following in the preamble.

The same can be done with similar counter types and document units such as "subsection".

Graphics and Graph editors

Vector image editors with latex support.

It is often preferable to use the same font and font size in your images as in the document. Moreover, for scientific images, you may need mathematical formulae or special characters (such as Greek letters). Both things can be achieved easily if the image editor allows you to use LaTeX code in your image. Most vector image editors do not offer this option. There are, however, a few exceptions.

In early days, LaTeX users used Xfig for their drawings. The editor is still used by quite a few people nowadays because it has special 'export to LaTeX' features. It also gives you some very basic ways of encapsulating LaTeX text and math in the image (setting the text's 'special flag' to 'special' instead of 'normal'). When exporting, all LaTeX text will be put in a .tex-file, separately from the rest of the image (which is put in a .ps file).

A newer and easier-to-use vector image editor specially tailored to LaTeX use is IPE . It allows any LaTeX command, including but not limited to mathematical formulae in the image. The program saves its files as editable .eps or .pdf files, which eliminates the need of exporting your image each time you have edited it.

A very versatile vector image editor is Inkscape . It does not support LaTeX text by itself, but you can use the plugin Textext for that. This allows you to put any block of LaTeX code in your image. Additionally since version 0.48 you can export to vectorgraphics with texts separated in a .tex file. Using this way text is rendered by the latex compiler itself.

LaTeXDraw is a free and open source graphical PSTricks generator and editor. It allows you to draw basic geometric objects and save the result in a variety of formats including .jpg, .png, .eps, .bmp as well as .tex. In the last case the saved file contains PSTricks/LaTeX code only. Owing to that you can include any possible LaTeX code in the picture, since the file is rendered by your LaTeX environment directly.

Another way to generate vectorgraphics is using the Asymptote language. It is a programming language which produces vector images in encapsulated postscript format and supports LaTeX syntax in any textlabels.

Graphs with gnuplot

A simple method to include graphs and charts in LaTeX documents is to create it within a common spreadsheet software (OpenOffice Calc or MS Office Excel etc.) and include it in the document as a cropped screenshot. However, this produces poor quality rasterized images. Calc also allows you to copy-paste the charts into OpenOffice Draw and save them as PDF files.

Using Microsoft Excel 2010, charts can be copied directly to Microsoft Expression Design 4, where they can be saved as PDF files. These PDF files can be included in LaTeX. This method produces high quality vectorized images.

An excellent method to render graphs is through gnuplot , a free and versatile plotting software, that has a special output filter directly for exporting files to LaTeX. We assume, that the data is in a CSV file (comma separated text) in the first and third column. A simple gnuplot script to plot the data can look like this:

Now gnuplot produces two files: the graph drawing in graph.eps and the text in graph.tex . The second includes the EPS image, so that we only need to include the file graph.tex in our document:

The above steps can be automated by the package gnuplottex. By placing gnuplot commands inside \begin{gnuplot}\end{gnuplot}, and compiling with latex -shell-escape, the graphs are created and added into your document.

Failure to access gnuplot from latex for Windows can be solved by making file title only in one word. Don't type my report.tex for your title file, but do myreport.tex .

When you are using gnuplottex it is also possible to directly pass the terminal settings as an argument to the environment

Using gnuplottex can cause fraudulent text-highlighting in some editors when using algebraic functions on imported data, such as:

Some editors will think of all following text as part of a formula and highlight it as such (because of the '$' that is interpreted as part of the latex code). This can be avoided by ending with:

As it uncomments the dollar sign for the gnuplot interpreter, but is not affecting the interpretation of the .tex by the editor.

When using pdfLaTeX instead of simple LaTeX, we must convert the EPS image to PDF and to substitute the name in the graph1.tex file. If we are working with a Unix-like shell, it is simply done using:

With the included tex file we can work as with an ordinary image.

Instead of calling eps2pdf directly, we can also include the epstopdf package that automates the process. If we include a graphics now and leave out the file extension, epstopdf will automatically transform the .eps-file to PDF and insert it in the text.

This way, if we choose to output to PS or DVI, the EPS version is used and if we output to PDF directly, the converted PDF graphics is used. Please note that usage of epstopdf requires compiling with latex -shell-escape.

Note: Emacs AucTex users might want to check out Gnuplot-mode .

Generate png screenshots

See Export To Other Formats .

Spell-checking and Word Counting

If you want to spell-check your document, you can use the command-line aspell , hunspell (preferably), or ispell programs.

All three understand LaTeX and will skip LaTeX commands. You can also use a LaTeX editor with built-in spell checking, such as LyX , Kile , or Emacs . Another option is to convert LaTeX source to plain text and open resulting file in a word processor like OpenOffice.org or KOffice.

If you want to count words you can, again, use LyX or convert your LaTeX source to plain text and use, for example, UNIX wc command:

An alternative to the detex command is the pdftotext command which extracts an ASCII text file from PDF:

New even page

In the twoside-mode you have the ability to get a new odd-side page by:

However, LaTeX doesn't give you the ability to get a new even-side page. The following method opens up this;

The following must be put in your document preamble:

To active the new even-side page, type the following where you want the new even-side:

If the given page is an odd-side page, the next new page is subsequently an even-side page, and LaTeX will do nothing more than a regular \newpage. However, if the given page is an even page, LaTeX will make a new (odd) page, put in a placeholder, and make another new (even) page. A crude but effective method.

Sidebar with information

If you want to put a sidebar with information like copyright and author, you might want to use the eso-pic package. Example:

If you want it on one page only, use the starred version of the AddToShipoutPicture command at the page you want it. ( \AddToShipoutPicture*{...} )

Hide auxiliary files

If you're using pdflatex you can create a folder in which all the output files will be stored, so your top directory looks cleaner.

Please note that the folder tmp should exist. However if you're using a Unix-based system you can do something like this:

Or for vim modify your .vimrc:

LaTeX Tips and Tricks

After a discussion on twitter I decided I should write down a few of the tips and tricks I’ve learnt over the years of writing papers and many other things in LaTeX.

If you’re very sure you need a full-blown LaTeX document, continue reading below. Otherwise, triple and quadruple-check if you can’t just get away with writing Markdown and just use pandoc to convert your document to LaTeX/PDF.

The Eisvogel template seems particularly cool.

I like Visual Studio Code for LaTeX nowadays. I use the LaTeX Workshop plugin. It’s worth going through the settings if you have e.g. subfiles in your project or need to tweak the builds.

Compiling TeX is a pain. You commonly see people using Makefiles with the “usual” invocation of pdflatex :

But this invocation takes so much time! Especially if your page layout hasn’t changed (so references haven’t moved), then it mostly runs those extra runs unnecessarily.

A smarter way is using Latexmk which just runs the compiler and BibTex automatically, how many times is necessary.

Check out the KOMA document classes

If you’re not stuck to a publisher template, check out the KOMA-Script document classes. Basically use scrartcl instead of article , or scrreport instead of report , or scrbook instead of book . They’re probably part of your TeX distribution and you might like the results. Minor issue: the English documentation has most things, but some things are only documented in German.

Split up your projects

Use \input to separate your different files, e.g. by section:

If you’re writing very large sections/chapters that take a while to compile, look into subfiles (mentioned below).

Useful packages

I generally use the following stuff in my preamble:

This package just makes dealing with commands so much easier: \newcommand{\foo}{some text\xspace} makes \foo not eat the space (and \foo. still works like it should!). But there are some concerns that it sometimes fails, and it’s hard to predict when it will, which is a bad thing™️. I still use it.

Including code

I like the minted package for code. It does have a bit more setup: you need to run your TeX compiler with -shell-escape . You also need pygments on your computer.

Overleaf has a nice tutorial .

In-document references

The cleveref package makes referencing this a lot easier.

With these options, you can write the following:

And this will turn \cref{sec:someother} into a linked section 42 automatically. If you start a sentence with your reference, use the capitalised \Cref variant. There’s a whole bunch of styles.

Bibliography

Using a bibliography collection.

You can maintain your bibliographies yourself, but I like using cryptobib . It has most cryptography papers in it and the style is fairly consistent. A big downside is that it will usually link to the paywalled version of a paper. Also, it’s over 20 megabytes of data that bibtex will need to process. If you use biber (because you like biblatex ), this can even push your build time to over a minute. However, most publishers will only accept BibTex anyway (publishers are why we can’t have nice things).

Using BibLaTeX

In my thesis template, I included the following:

Using bibtex doesn’t allow me to use all of biblatex ’s fanciness. However, backref is already pretty nice and once my thesis is more finalised, I will probably switch to biber for the final runs. By then I will probably have extracted what I want from Cryptobib, to tweak the references into their final forms.

If you want to go into more experimental territories, I have a hacky script that can extract references from large bibliographies. You will need to mess with your build chain.

Pretty hyperlinks

The hyperref package takes some options to make the URLs a lot prettier. We use hypersetup here to pass the config.

Pretty tables

Use booktabs and never use vertical lines . If you need to separate two columns for organisation purposes, try if you can’t just do it by adding extra spacing: you can add @{\hskip 20pt} in your column specification.

Aligning text in (title) rows differently

I like to make the title row bold font. If there’s a column that’s, for example, right-aligned ( r ), then I sometimes want to change the alignment just for the title row. You can do that by using \multicolumn{1}{l}{your column content} : you define a 1-column multicolumn cell and you can specify how you want that cell aligned.

Filling in tables from measurements

I have measurement scripts in my research a lot, for example for benchmarks. I like to process those benchmarks with a simple python script that generates LaTeX files for me that just define \newcommand s for each result:

These follow a set pattern, becuase I then like to define my table rows as follows: I define a \newcommand that lays out a single table row for me:

And then I use this macro to fill in my table:

The magic here is in \csuse (from etoolbox ), which allows me to fetch the defined \newcommand macros with the results from the \experimentcached macro parameter.

Finding overfull hboxes

Horizontal boxes that are overfull are a common thing that you will run into. At first this warning doesn’t make sense, but what LaTeX is trying to tell you is that it needs too much horizontal space and thus is spilling over into your margins.

The following command helps you locate where this is happening. Many packages set this automatically if you enable draft mode. However, draft mode generally disables included pictures, which is super annoying.

If you have a paragraph that is spilling (usually because of a word/macro TeX can’t hyphenate), you should try to either reword that paragraph or add in manual hyphenations. Note that if a word is already hyphenated, LaTeX will not add additional hypenations. For example, extraordinarily-long would only break between extraordinarily and long . With the hyphenat package, you can write extraordinarily\hyp{}long , and then LaTeX will allow it to break in extraordinarily as well (because I don’t think long can be hyphenated).

If you get this error in paragraphs/sections that you don’t have control over, like the bibliography, or if you don’t care so much to reword, you can also try slapping the paragraph between \sloppy and \fussy . These two commands allow LaTeX to mess with spacing in ways that are often considered ugly but are probably better than poking into the margin.

Different versions of your paper (long/short, anonymous)

If you’re hitting a page limit, you often need to omit stuff that you want to include in an “online” version. You might also need an anonymous version of your paper. The way I’ve generally done this is by using plain TeX if statements:

This is not the prettiest way of doing conditionals, but it’s very easy and works almost anywhere, including in titles or author listings.

You would use it as follows:

More advanced hints

A hacked lncs template.

If you’re using llncs , you might want to take a peek at this hacked llncs template , which makes a bunch of improvements that may or may not be okay with Springer.

Fixing the PDF bookmarks in llncs.cls

llncs sets the table of contents depth to 0, to make sure you don’t print it. But this change also breaks PDF bookmarks, so make sure to add the following option to your hyperref setup:

Other LaTeX compilers

If you want to use fancier fonts, and you don’t care about a publisher: LuaLaTeX is probably the way to go right now.

Standalone TeX graphics

If you find your TikZ graphics are increasing your compile times, look into standalone . This package can even compile your pictures for you and just include the pdf directly after the first build, automatically!

Compiling sections independently

The subfiles package is super useful if you have book-sized documents. It allows you to compile e.g. chapters independently. See this tutorial

Advanced typography warnings

See the inpnattypo package . Warning: the authors are French pedantics.

Don’t use

The following are bad, in my opinion:

Narrow margins (e.g. a4wide )

The margins in LaTeX document classes are set in such a way that they make the text easy to read. If you increase the line length a lot (ie. smaller margins), your text just turns into a hard-to-get-into wall. If you’re not trying to save actual trees (ie. you’re printing the document), it doesn’t matter! You may want to try scrartcl if you’re printing on A4, though.

Thom Wiggers

Senior cryptography researcher.

My research interests include (post-quantum) cryptography and protocols

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ThesisWritingTricks

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Tips on Preparing for Your Defense

A comprehensive checklist of tasks that one should consider for the defense is listed here .

Allison Okamura's notes for finishing your PhD

Includes some Latex and thesis tips: Attach:Allison_OKamura_Notes-for-finishing-the-PhD.pdf

There you are, ready to write you thesis. Here is a compilation of tricks of the trade... don't forget to add stuff to it as you discover it! Alexis LD

Thesis (and Paper) Writing Tricks

On this page... ( hide )

1. Meeting Page Limits
2. Minimize PDF Size
3.1 For Mac Users
3.2 More General Approach with Inkscape
4.1 Figures tips from ME310 Latex template
5.1 Mendeley Bibtex Syncing
5.2 Bibtex
6. Hyperlinks in documents
7. Tables in Latex

Nov 2018: Matt Estrada's notes on formatting for AAAS Science Robotics

1. Meeting Page Limits

Some nice tricks of the trade on "LaTeX tips to meet publication page limits" on this blog: http://ravirao.wordpress.com/2005/11/19/latex-tips-to-meet-publication-page-limits/

Includes description on using vspace, addtolength, and setting specific margins and spacing between sections.

Savetrees: Another good one is the Latex savetrees package.

Also, a nifty quick way to count words in the finished pdf document: http://app.uio.no/ifi/texcount/online.php

While still in Latex you can also use the detex command to get a plain ascii file with all your words with the Latex stuff stripped out. Then you can just count words of this file.

Can use the web interface and load a .tex file, or download the Perl script, also counts figures, tables and equations.

2. Minimize PDF Size

(maybe more useful for paper-writing)

Web method: smallpdf.com. Just drag-and-drop your pdf and it will automatically download a reduced-size version for you.

3. Vector Images with Latex Text

3.1 for mac users.

A super easy solution is to make figures, with equations, in Keynote and print to PDF. If you enter "Insert Equation" in Keynote and then type Latex into the box it works.

3.2 More General Approach with Inkscape

This always happens...you have vector-based images generated from solidworks, inkscape, powerpoint, matlab or python that look great but don't support latex fonts or text options like easy subscript. How do you get those features? INKSCAPE can do it.

Get your vector image imported into inkscape. Its native filetype is .svg, but it can import images from many sources, such as vector pdfs generated from solidworks or .wmf files saved from powerpoint. The point is, if you save it as a vector image, inkscape can probably edit it.
Check out the .pdf file that has been generated. The text should have been stripped away.
Check out the .pdf_tex file that has been generated. You may need to edit the image path depending on your latex project location.
You can also edit the text directly in your .pdf_tex file if you need to change font sizes or modify the text. It is much harder to move the text around using this method, so I suggest saving the intermediate inkscape image as an .svg so you can edit in the future.
In a normal figure, where you would normally put the \includegraphics command, replace it with an \input command, with the path to the .pdf_tex file instead of the .pdf. Details on this step, including image sizing, can be found in the .pdf_tex file itself.

4. PDF images and figures

How to crop the white border around the pdf generated by matlab

On a MAC, in terminal, you can use pdfcrop:

pdfcrop -margins 10 fig.pdf fig.pdf

Or you can use Preview on the Mac and crop, rotate and other jolly things, then resave the pdf file. But the command line method above would let you write a batch program to do a whole bunch of figures at once...

Or, you can take the pdf output (print to pdf. It seems to come out a standard size) and use the clip and trim commands. I find that "trim = 40mm 85mm 40mm 85mm" works pretty good for the matlab produced pdfs. I couple it with scale to linewidth. Complete syntax is \includegraphics[trim = 40mm 85mm 40mm 85mm, clip, width=\linewidth]{fig.pdf} (Sam)

When using images from Powerpoint, have Powerpoint print to PDF, then pull into Preview, crop, etc.

If you have the figure as PDF, you can pull it into Inkscape or Illustrator or Keynote to edit, add markup etc.

4.1 Figures tips from ME310 Latex template

ME310 reports can run to 200 pages and look a lot like a thesis, with lots of figures. So the following tips can be useful:

Latex tips for ME310 reports
Use \clearpage to force Latex to unload its queue of figures, so that the text can catch up. If necessary, it will put some figures on pages by themselves before starting the next section.
Use the \caption[short caption]{This is the long caption} feature so that your Table of Figures doesn't get too many long entries (see example below).

Full page figures in landscape orientation:

5. References

5.1 mendeley bibtex syncing.

MRC : I think the nicest solution is the one that John Ulmen figured out for our Dynamic Sensing chapter:

Set up a (shared) Mendeley database for all your references.
Also in Mendeley/Preferences/Document Details check that you set "citation key" to always be included as a field.
Finally, when you import things into Mendeley, always enter something useful like "Asbeck2012spine-mechanisms" for the contents of the citation key field.

Now you will always have a .bib file that has useful citation keys. Never edit the .bib file directly; just update Mendeley as new references come in.

The "Import to Mendeley" tab on browsers is a bit dangerous. For anything that you import, it is wise to check afterward to be sure the details are all correct. It usually works OK for journals, less reliable with conference publications.
There is a tool in Mendeley that can help you find and merge duplicate entries
Note that when you "copy" references from one collection or group to another, you are actually just updating the links; it is not duplicating the entry.

January 2013: Stanford has made a deal with Mendeley that gives you more storage and group membership options than the standard free account. To make use of it, you just need to Join the Stanford Group. See the Stanford Library Mendeley page for details.

You can do pretty much the same thing using Zotero but we seem not to be using Zotero...

5.2 Bibtex

A few words about Bibtex: Bibtex is not Latex. It's a separate program with its own syntax. It doesn't understand percent symbols for comments. It tends to ignore anything in braces {xxx} that it doesn't understand.

When citing conference proceedings:

Are you sure there is not a subsequent journal article? If so cite it instead.
Otherwise, use @inproceedings -- do not use @article -- for the citation. For citing web pages use @misc.

There is a free program that comes as part of the giant Texshop/Latex/Tex installation on Macs called BibDesk . It is good (and picky) about finding errors and cleaning up your .bib files if necessary -- although fixing things in this way kind of violates the Mendeley-->.bib idea above.

6. Hyperlinks in documents

Really handy if your long document has hyperlinks so when you click on citations or figure references or any cited URL it pops you there. Also table of contents, list of figures, etc. The default hyperref setting is a it ugly with colored boxes everywhere. A nice, non-intrusive solution from alumnus Alan Asbeck:

7. Tables in Latex

Simple tables are not bad, but fancy tables are a pain in Latex. If you don't want to learn how to do them, you have two other options:

Use a program like https://www.tablesgenerator.com/ -- this is a web-based utility that lets you enter data in something like a spreadsheet and set borders etc. Then it generates the Latex markup.
Do your table in MS Word or Open Office, print to PDF and import the cropped PDF just like a figure. Call it Table, Latex doesn't care.
Cropping PDFs of tables is easy in Inkscape or Preview (on Mac). Open the file, go to document properties, select crop to image. Be sure to leave margins or the bottom of your table may be cropped off!

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Best Way to Start Using LaTeX/TeX?

I'm not really a programmer but I'm quite interested in learning how to use LaTeX/TeX. I've looked it up on Wikipedia and scanned through it and the documents created through this way of editing is just beautiful. Formulas are also available within it too, so writing math thesis or physics papers would be amazing.

Is this system just for programmers, or can normal people use it too? (I'm mainly a designer, so I usually edit it in Word or InDesign.)

12 @Caramdir I refer you to this: imgs.xkcd.com/comics/purity.png – Seamus Commented Oct 23, 2010 at 12:35

10 Answers 10

I think a good place to start is to flick through the not so short introduction to LaTeX . Obviously, you don't need to read it cover-to-cover, but it's good to read enough to understand how and more importantly why LaTeX is different from a word processor like Word.

The first most disorienting thing about LaTeX is that you don't have a WYSIWYG approach. (What You See Is What You Get). If you're unfamiliar with the idea of markup this is quite a change. Instead of showing your computer what you want by selecting the text and clicking the " bold " button, LaTeX works by getting you to tell your computer what you want:

This command \textbf is basically saying to your computer "make the text between braces boldface".

When learning LaTeX, the most important thing is knowing where to go when you get stuck. I've found googling the problem to be a surprisingly good way of finding answers to problems. For example, if you want to know how to turn off automatic numbering of the sections, googling "turn off section numbering LaTeX" brings up two sites with useful information as the first hits: The LaTeX wikibook page on document structure and a blog with some tips and tricks which both include ways to solve the problem.

The LaTeX wikibook is a good resource. It is pretty basic, but it covers the basics rather well. Another LaTeX primer is available here.

If it's a particular package you're having difficulty with, use the texdoc facility. So if you're struggling with, say, the hyperref package, typing texdoc hyperref into the command line will open up the documentation for that package. This works for most packages. (If you're on Windows, I suppose Start Menu > Run gets you a command line, right?)

There is an awful lot to learn, and don't try and learn it all at once. Start with a simple project, get that to work. And only then think about how to complicate matters. LaTeX takes practice. You won't be able to migrate from doing everything in Word to doing everything in LaTeX overnight... But stick at it and you can do pretty much everything Word can and more! And better.

You already know about this site, which is another excellent place to know about. If googling around and the wikibook can't answer your question, someone on this site almost certainly can.

13 I should mentioned that I'm a research student in a philosophy department, so I'm not exactly a "programmer type". But then, I don't really fit the "normal person" category either. (How many philosophers do you know who use emacs and spend their spare time playing with R and netLogo?) – Seamus Commented Oct 23, 2010 at 12:37
10 "How many philosophers do you know who use emacs and spend their spare time playing with R and netLogo?" Clearly, not enough... not enough... – levesque Commented Oct 23, 2010 at 19:51
1 For a command line on Windows, Start+R, then type "cmd" and hit enter. On Windows 8, you type "cmd" into the text box in the slidy thingy on the right of the screen. (I saw one of the kids in CoderDojo do this the other day.) – TRiG Commented Sep 21, 2014 at 3:03
1 You say "You won't be able to migrate from doing everything in Word to doing everything in LaTeX overnight"... but I find your logic faulty. It assumes that I could "do everything in Word". 8^) – Steven B. Segletes Commented Mar 30, 2015 at 10:11

To add to Seamus and Pieter's answers, you should find yourself a project, a document which you would like to render with LaTeX. Without any goal, you will slowly lose interest (at least I know that I would).

2 Exactly, that is how I learned latex. First I liked the documents prepared by latex. I started making my CV by means of latex. After I got familiar a little more with latex; I started writing my masters thesis with latex. Then I prepared my presentation of masters thesis with latex. Now I really like that I know a little about latex and I can typeset with it. Now I am so proud that I know latex and that I use it. – enthu Commented Mar 30, 2015 at 6:53

It is not at all a system solely for programmers. Fact, the learning curve might be steeper than Word's or InDesign's, but that's because you need another way of thinking about typesetting. That might lead to the image of TeX being more for programmers, but that's just because programmers are more familiar with working in another mindset (e.g., using your keyboard and plaintext to get something done).

Just go ahead and learn LaTeX by reading some online tutorials. The Related section on this question suggests a really nice starting place for this: What are good learning resources for a LaTeX beginner? .

And, as both a computer science and mathematics student, I'd say mathematicians are better at LaTeX than computer scientists / programmers. So there goes the proposition of LaTeX being for programmers :).

All of these are great responses. My simple response would be "write something." Take something that you would write any day, like a letter or any printed document for one of your customers. Then mark it up. Give it sections, bold text, etc.

Experiment!

If you know nothing about LaTeX, I'd suggest starting with an online editor. Here's why:

It usually has the most up-to-date distribution and a nifty editor to go with it. Yes, a distribution and an editor are two different things in the TeX world, and it might not be apparent to anyone new to the environment which is which and where to place them.

Typically they provide templates that you can use that just work . Almost the only thing you may have to get used to is to compile after making a change. However, in some instances, compilation is automatically executed with every change of code.

Once you're familiar with the document structure through using some template, you can further your knowledge by working with content in the preamble , using extra styles and other document classes .

After spending some time fiddling around with the interface, language structure, production sequence and styles, you can move towards installing a local version that you maintain yourself.

Two online editors that spring to mind (providing the above interface and templates) are:

See Comparison: ShareLaTeX vs Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX) .

2 +1, good idea! But I don't agree with It usually has the most up-to-date distribution , both Overleaf and ShareLaTeX don't have the latest versions of the packages, they are updated only periodically. – CarLaTeX Commented May 26, 2017 at 3:59

Probably the easiest way to think about TeX is in terms of HTML and CSS, if you're a designer, or in terms of Styles in InDesign.

In InDesign, for example, you can write plain text files and then import them into your indesign document. You can tag those plain text files to tell InDesign what the proper application of styles are to various bits of text, this is a header, that's italic, and so forth.

Then, in your document, you can define what those tags mean in terms of output.

TeX is a lot like that. You write a text file that contains tags to define the properties of the text, and there is a separate file (a class file) that determines how big a section title is, how to interpret bold face, and things like that.

To get started, you need to install TeX Live from the TeX Users group. If you aren't a scientific type, and want great control over your document, you might consider using a different package than LaTeX. La is a set of macros (think shortcuts) that make TeX (the typesetting language) easier to use, but it is biased towards journal publications and isolates you from page layout.

If you want more control over the final look, you might be happier using the ConTeXt package--again, this is a layer on top of the underlying system designed to simplify its use.

To use any of these things is fairly simple: you write a plain text file in the editor of your choice and then use the command line (or at least, I use the command line) to run a typesetting command like pdflatex mydocument.tex . If all goes well, the result is a beautiful PDF.

The way I started, and often still use, latex is quick and dirty. Pull up what you want from your favorite search engine and copy/paste. Grab a resume http://rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/ or a {any document type} {search: {any document type} tempplate latex} and start modifying it to suit your needs. If you need technical stuff some journals (ieee I know) publish their template.

You'll find yourself picking up little tidbits on your way to being able (eventually) to hack up a file from scratch. There's a nice smartphone app that's a quick reference. The LaTeX symbol list is a nice resource if you'll be doing some heavy stuff.

Latex is easy and fun and you'll be typesetting your Christmas cards from now on I'm positive.

4 I quite strongly disagree with the search engine & copy-paste part. There's an awful lot of bad code out there, either not robust or completely obsolete (not even mentioning sub-optimal solutions à la "code it yourself" when there's a package that does it better). I too often need help colleagues (mathematicians, not "programmer type") debugging their bloated preamble grown from copy-pasting overs the years. I definitely don't recommend this approach over the long run. – mpg Commented Oct 30, 2010 at 1:11

Yes, you can use it!! While I am in computer tech support I am by no means a programmer. I use LaTeX for all of my procedure documentation as well as letters and it is outstanding! It just might take a while to get your head around it. Install TexLive and Texmakerx, find a simple article-class template and start experimenting. That's the only way you'll learn it.

I don't use a word processor unless it's to open someone else's document.

Although this question is quite old I would like to add a quick and easy first glimpse tool:

https://de.sharelatex.com/learn

And they even have several templates.

That word, like Pavlov's bell. – Johannes_B Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 15:31
Johannes_B I don't understand... – A Feldman Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 15:50

Well, 'normal' people might welcome the help of a WYSIWYG-type interface for Windows or Mac such as Scientific Word or Scientific WorkPlace . These programs let you see what you're doing, while writing the LaTeX document for you. Hope that's of interest...

Transparency mode ON We sell this software! Transparency mode OFF

For just € 1127, as far as I can see, for an educational (floating) licence. – egreg Commented Apr 17, 2017 at 22:41
1 Yes... plus VAT. But the usual Fixed licence works for 95% of users... and a Scientific Word Educational Fixed licence is only about €510. Plus VAT. – Christopher Mabb Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 23:32
2 The adverb ”only" makes for a nice comical effect. – egreg Commented Apr 19, 2017 at 5:54

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Speaker 1: Hello, dear viewer. Welcome to LaTeX for Scientists. I'm Dr. Sally, and this is the first part of my first ever Skills for Scientists series. If you've seen or heard people talking about LaTeX before, but you're not sure if you should learn it, this is the video for you. The short answer to that question is yes. Yes, you should. Absolutely. 100%. As a side note, if you're wondering why it's pronounced La-tech and not La-tex, it's because the X represents the Greek letter Chi, or He, and not the Latin script X. During my PhD, I learned a lot of little tips, tricks, and helpful shortcuts that I can now share with you, and hopefully by the end of this series you're going to love LaTeX as much as I do. Whenever I talk to students, the first thing they always ask me about LaTeX is, can't I just use Word? And I always tell them of course you can, but future you is going to hate you for it. It's definitely hard to see the point of learning LaTeX when you're an undergraduate. I mean, you can easily do your lab reports in Word, but when it comes to writing a 60-page dissertation, or even worse, a 200-page thesis, it's a lot easier to do it in LaTeX. The only problem is that if you leave it until that point to start learning, that's a whole pile of extra stress that you really don't need at that point. The learning curve isn't actually very steep, so why not learn it earlier and give yourself plenty of time to practice? After that, they usually give me a dubious look and say, but LaTeX looks so complicated. And I actually do agree with them. It does look complicated, but once you get started, it's actually a lot easier than you think. The biggest time investment is really in making your templates look good, but then once you have them, you can just reuse them as often as you like. This is especially great if you're an undergrad and you want to use it to write your lab reports with. For most PhD students in STEM, there are only two real reasons why you might still be using Word. One, you're submitting articles to journals that are stuck in the 90s. Or two, your supervisor never learned LaTeX, because they too are stuck in the 90s. Even though Word has caught up a little bit in the last few years, it's not really made for us. LaTeX is still objectively a million times better for people in STEM. It's more powerful, it's flexible, it produces much smaller documents but they still look clean and crispy and beautiful, and it takes much less effort on your part once you know how to use it. Still not convinced? Let's take a quick look at just some of the best reasons to use it. No distractions. You can just focus on writing your thesis without having to fiddle with all the formatting every 5 minutes, especially because you just added another figure and then suddenly everything is broken. Tracking stuff. It automatically tracks figures and tables and equations, so you can insert stuff wherever you want to, and it tracks and updates the numbering for you, so you don't have to worry about it. Easy formatting. You can change the formatting of the entire document just by tweaking a couple of commands. And if you don't like it, you can just change it to something else just as easily. Problem solving and portability. It's open source, so not only is everything free, but if you've got a problem I guarantee you that someone's already had it solved for them on the internet. And if you have to switch between different operating systems, which you usually do as a scientist, everything still works. Equations. If you have to use any kind of math or any complex non-Latin scripts on your work, it makes your life considerably easier. References. You don't have to waste hours fiddling with your bibliography. All the entries are formatted to whatever system you tell it to use, and many journals already provide bibliography entries for papers on their websites, so you don't actually have to fill in the data yourself or use any intermediate software unless you really want to. Templates. Most journals these days provide LaTeX templates for you to use, and most universities will also give you dissertation or thesis templates. As an added bonus, if you use the online platform Overleaf, you don't have to worry about saving your files, installing packages, or compiling. All of that stuff is handled for you behind the scenes, which makes it absolutely ideal for beginners. It also lets you work collaboratively, which is handy if you're writing papers or you need to get some feedback from your PI. Since it's so convenient, and free, I'll be using Overleaf for the rest of this series, so you can work along with me. For all of the videos on my channel, you'll find corresponding written resources and other free content on my website, so check out soswriting.co.uk. If I've managed to convince you of the virtues of LaTeX, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. In the next episode, we're going to do a quick start guide to help get you rolling. If you've struggled with LaTeX before, or if you're a bit nervous about starting, leave a comment down below and tell me what you'd like help with. I always try to read the comments, and I'll either incorporate your questions into the upcoming videos, or I'll do a quick Q&A session. So all that's left for me to say is thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.

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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure
How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure
Writing a thesis in LaTeX
The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks. Document class. The first choice in most cases will be the report document class: 1. \documentclass[options]{report} See here for a complete list of options.
PDF Tips and Tricks in LaTeX
The following command has been used in the LaTeX template to get the font: \usepackage{times} The default font size in LaTeX using the times package is 10-point size font. When you convert it to PDF, the font becomes 11.96 size. This is because the sizing ratio between LaTeX and Word is approximately 1.25:1.5.
How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX
Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf. We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library, and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files. We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are ...
PDF Writing a Thesis in LATEX: hints, tips and advice
3.2.1 LATEX code v Image Formats • LATEX code: - Text in images will use same font as document. - Images can include well formatted equations. - The LATEX code can be edited to ﬁne-tune image. - LATEX code can only produce vector graphics. - You may need a particular driver to understand the code
LaTeX Theses and Dissertations
Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references, and getting started guides. Managing References. BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format.
PDF Some Tips and Tricks for Using LaTeX in Math Theses
Some Tips and Tricks for Using LaTeX in Math Theses by Rob Benedetto How to Use the les samplethesis.tex, thesis.tex, and latextips.tex WARNING!!!! This document (latextips.tex) is NOTa good model to build a math thesis from. The margins are wrong, the spacing is wrong, and the style of writing is far too colloquial.
7 LaTeX Tips for Writing Your Thesis or Dissertation
7 LaTeX Tips for Writing Your Thesis or Dissertation. LaTeX (pronounced lay-tech) is a system for document preparation widely used in mathematics, science, engineering, and linguistics. It allows you to create beautifully presented academic work and is especially useful when you need to include formulas, footnotes, bibliographies, or tables of ...
Formatting in LaTeX
To use the LaTeX and ut-thesis, you need two things: a LaTeX distribution (compiles your code), and an editor (where you write your code). Two main approaches are: Overleaf: is a web-based platform that combines a distribution (TeX Live) and an editor. It is beginner-friendly (minimal set-up) and some people prefer a cloud-based platform.
LibGuides: Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home
Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references, and getting started guides. Managing References. BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format.
General LaTeX tips and tricks
This page lists a number of general LaT eX tips and tricks that I learned while working on my PhD thesis. I have written the entries in a Question-and-Answer format, but cannot rightly call them FAQs. After all, these questions were not asked frequently, but just the once — by me. Also, in contrast to many real FAQ pages and documents, my ...
PDF LATEX: Tips and Tricks
PS/LaTeX or Combined PDF/LaTeX (when using pd atex. As of this writing the version on zeno does not export to pdf. I assume if some people write an email (help@math.) this might change. Exporting will produce two les: *.pstexand *.pstex_t, or *.pdftexand *.pdftex_t. Put the *_t filein your latex source. This is one example for such a le.
Advice for writing LaTeX documents
If you're writing a scientific book, a paper, or a thesis in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics or a related field, it pays to write it using LaTeX, especially if your work contains formulas, symbols, and heavy cross referencing.Here is advice for doing so, collected over decades of writing hundreds of papers and books, mostly using LaTeX.
Tips and Tricks for Writing Scientific Papers
Best practice and tips & tricks to write scientific papers in LaTeX, with figures generated in Python or Matlab. ... For longer documents, such as a master or PhD thesis, it can be useful to have back references in the bibliography, to show where a reference was cited. ... Best practice and tips & tricks to write scientific papers in LaTeX ...
I wrote a chemistry bachelor thesis in latex
For writing use Setzer on Linux and Tex-studio on Windows (or literally any other offline latex editor). There are tens of different editors though, use any you feel comfortable with, even notepad.
How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX
Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf. We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library, and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files. We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are ...
LaTeX/Tips and Tricks
hunspell -l -t -i utf-8 yourfile.tex. All three understand LaTeX and will skip LaTeX commands. You can also use a LaTeX editor with built-in spell checking, such as LyX, Kile, or Emacs. Another option is to convert LaTeX source to plain text and open resulting file in a word processor like OpenOffice.org or KOffice.
LaTeX Tips and Tricks
After a discussion on twitter I decided I should write down a few of the tips and tricks I've learnt over the years of writing papers and many other things in LaTeX.. Pandoc. If you're very sure you need a full-blown LaTeX document, continue reading below. Otherwise, triple and quadruple-check if you can't just get away with writing Markdown and just use pandoc to convert your document ...
ThesisWritingTricks
Includes some Latex and thesis tips: Attach:Allison_OKamura_Notes-for-finishing-the-PhD.pdf. There you are, ready to write you thesis. Here is a compilation of tricks of the trade... don't forget to add stuff to it as you discover it! ... Some nice tricks of the trade on "LaTeX tips to meet publication page limits" on this blog: ...
Tips for writing (in LaTeX)
Tips for writing (in LaTeX) This template will get you started with writing your report or thesis and can also be used to create slides. This template is too large to compile with Overleaf's free plan. For possible workarounds, read the last paragraph of section A.1.4. It contains:
Best Way to Start Using LaTeX/TeX?
Formulas are also available within it too, so writing math thesis or physics papers would be amazing. ... The LaTeX wikibook page on document structure and a blog with some tips and tricks which both include ways ... I started making my CV by means of latex. After I got familiar a little more with latex; I started writing my masters thesis with ...
LaTeX for Scientists: Why You Should Learn It and How to ...
During my PhD, I learned a lot of little tips, tricks, and helpful shortcuts that I can now share with you, and hopefully by the end of this series you're going to love LaTeX as much as I do. ... a 200-page thesis, it's a lot easier to do it in LaTeX. The only problem is that if you leave it until that point to start learning, that's a whole ...
Templates
Tips for writing (in LaTeX) This template will get you started with writing your report or thesis and can also be used to create slides. This template is too large to compile with Overleaf's free plan. For possible workarounds, read the last paragraph of section A.1.4. It contains: a title page for VUB, BRUFACE and ULB a project plan a jury ...

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