# Women in Technology

Hear us Roar

 Article: LaTeX: It's Not Just for Academia, Part 2 Subject: LaTeX part 2: corrections Date: 2004-03-06 05:49:03 From: maartensneep I have some remarks: The article states: "Any line beginning with a % is a comment. When LaTeX reads the % character in a file, it treats the rest of that line as a comment." This is true, but the comment does more: it also removes the return and any whitespace at the beginning of the next line. This makes it essential for suppressing unwanted spaces in the output (remember that a return counts as a space). BTW: to get a '%' in the output, type \%. After this, the article states: "In addition to the comment token, you can use the comment command. \begin{comment} This is a comment and is not displayed in the final document. \end{comment}" This does not work out of the box, but only after loading the comment package: \usepackage{comment} ===== The standard document classes are not very flexible. The memoir (book) class is very flexible, and comes with a great manual. Others prefer the KOMA script bundle. For letters and slides, the other options are way better than the original classes. Most installations (teTeX through i-Installer certainly) come with these classes. ===== (typo: in the "Generating an index" section, first paragraph: "makeinx package"should be "makeidx package") ===== Regarding BibTeX: a slightly more elaborate example might help: @article{okeefe1988, author = {O'Keefe, A. and Deacon, D.A.G.}, title = {Cavity ring-down optical spectrometer for absorption measurements using pulsed laser sources}, journal = rsi, year = 1988, volume = 59, number = {12}, pages = {2544-2551}, annote = {Abstract goes here...} } Note that the authors are separated by and, not by commas! For most articles I write, I need to submit without the title. Just put as much information into the bibliographic database, and use the appropriate bib style format to get what I need. These bst-files are notoriously hard to write, the makebst script will help you here: run tex makebst, and answer all questions. You'll end up with a bst file that does what you want it to do. I've made one which allows me to print a whole database, including the abstracts, so I have an easy overview of the articles I've read. ===== In addition to the tables mentioned here, you may need tables that split across multiple pages. The standard ones don't do this, I recommend the package longtable to do this. ===== The graphics files supported by pdflatex are (without dirty tricks): pdf, png, jpg, and metapost output. eps can be converted to pdf with either ghostscript (wich gives you access to epstopdf) or Panther's pstopdf, just use Preview.app. Only eps is reliably supported by (standard) latex. If you leave out the extension, latex will search itself for a file with the most appropriate extension, so you can have eps and pdf files in the same dir, and (pdf)latex will figure it out for you. ===== Maths: use the amsmath-package, you won't regret it. Get a manual for serious usage. Normally maths (inline) is inserted like $f(x) = \sin(2\theta)$, displayed equations are given between $$...$$. ===== Further references: the comp.text.tex usenet FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html. ===== Happy TeXing! Maarten