LaTeX tips

Over the years I learned a few tricks in LateX. This is primarily inteded to aid my memory, and to help other people who want to do the same things I do, and who want to save some time.

Program listings

algorithm2e

good general-purpose package for adding pseudocode to you document

Listings

A source code printer for LaTeX. Supports many programming languages

alltt

like a verbatim, but "\", "{", and "}" keep their original meaning

Presentations

After using many different packages I finally settled on Beamer.

Figures

I usually use XFig, and export to "PDF+LaTeX".

Czech

I stopped using CSLaTeX some time ago. Babel now supports Czech reasonably well, so it is better to use it instead. My standard header looks as follows:

  \usepackage[czech]{babel}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

• Try utf-8 if utf8 does not work (happens to me on Windows). You can of course substitute any other encoding.
• \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} guarantees correct hyphenation (among other things).

When compiling, just use the standard latex of pdflatex command.

Czech quotes without CsLaTeX

The eaiest way is to define a new command \uv in the preamble:

\newcommand\uv[1]{\quotedblbase #1\textquotedblleft}

BibTeX

Erasing all unused entries from the bib file (i.e. for the proceedings submission):

bibtool -x document.aux -o document.bib

Software

I switched completely to TeXlive 2007 for both Linux and Windows.

Under Linux I use XEmacs for editing and under Windows I prefer the TeXnicCenter.

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Jan Obdržálek

Last modified: Thursday, 29-Oct-2009 11:16:10 CET