Latex Pro Tips

A collection of useful latex tips for writing scientific papers and reports. I’ll keep updating this page as I learn new tricks!

§ Math

For frequently used symbols, declare aliases in your preamble: e.g. \newcommand{\cO}{\mathcal O}
$$ ... $$ is deprecated, use \[ ... \] instead.
Always write the variable~$x$ instead of the variable $x$, so that latex will try to keep “variable” and “x” on the same line.
\def\<#1>{\langle#1\rangle} to write $<v,w>$.

§ Misc

One sentence per line makes for happy diffs.
Use some demarcators to make the file more readable, like:

%==============================================================================
\section{Section Name} \label{sec:one}
%==============================================================================  

Some text here...

%------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\subsection{Subsection} \label{sec:oneone}
%------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some text here...

References

Use \cref instead of \ref for smarter ref. names. (import with \usepackage{cleveref})
Use \Cref at the beginning of sentences and \cref in the middle.
- Do this even if you pass “capitalise” to the cleveref package, because \Cref forces things to be unabbreviated (eg. “Equation” instead of “Eq.”)

Stick to some labelling convention, like

\label{sec:some-section}
\label{subsec:some-subsection}
\label{eq:some-equation}
\label{tab:some-table}
\label{fig:some-figure}

§ Resources

Overleaf has some great tutorials for latex.

Acknowledgements

Most of these tips are taken from my advisor Michael Walter. I also want to thank Harold, Maxim, Levent, and Alex for their suggestions.

Misc Links

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144518/cannot-use-ampersand-as-argument-in-user-defined-command-with-optional-arguments
Christian Stump’s personal latex rules

Last updated: 04.12.2024