Revision as of 14:50, 13 February 2022

$\mathrm{\TeX}$ and $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$

$\mathrm{\TeX}$ is one of the masterpieces of Don Knuth.

It is the uppercase version of $\tau\epsilon\chi$, a Greek word for Tech, which is how $\mathrm{\TeX}$ should be pronounced (!?).

At some point in the early 2000, I switched to $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ for convenience, and almost exclusively use the latter now.

Equations

Alignment

Splitting equations within an aligned set can be done as followed~[1]:

\begin{align}
  a &= \begin{aligned}[t]
      &b + c + d +\\
      &c + e + f + g + h + i
       \end{aligned}\\
  k &= \begin{aligned}[t]
      &l + m + n\\
      &+ o + p + q
       \end{aligned}
\end{align}

To align equations as if in a table (?!), one can use [2] This is to integrate $\int x\sin(k\pi x)dx$ by parts.

\begin{align}
  u&=x  & v&=-\frac{1}{k\pi}\cos(k\pi x)\\
  u'&=1 & v'&=\sin(k\pi x)
\end{align}

To gather equations (from the Wolverhampton Lectures on Physics on Mathematics):

\begin{gather}
  \mathbb{R}^n\xrightarrow[\mathbf{J}_g\atop m\times n]{g}\mathbb{R}^m\xrightarrow[\mathbf{J}_f\atop l\times m]{f}\mathbb{R}^l\\
  \mathbb{R}^n\xrightarrow[\mathbf{J}_{f\circ g}\atop l\times n]{f\circ g}\mathbb{R}^l
\end{gather}

\begin{gather} \mathbb{R}^n\xrightarrow[\mathbf{J}_g\atop m\times n]{g}\mathbb{R}^m\xrightarrow[\mathbf{J}_f\atop l\times m]{f}\mathbb{R}^l\\ \mathbb{R}^n\xrightarrow[\mathbf{J}_{f\circ g}\atop l\times n]{f\circ g}\mathbb{R}^l \end{gather}

International accents

We try to write your name properly when we quote it. Here are the most common glyphs and the code needed to do so:

$?`$Does this work?

and a more comprehensive list of accentuated characters.

Fonts

See Will Robertson preambles to use different fontsets.

Shortcuts

Useful shortcuts, include:

• \to instead of \rightarrow for $\to$ (also mapsto for $\mapsto$)
• \gets instead of \leftarrow for $\gets$.
• \implies instead of \Longrightarrow for $\implies$ (is there a shortcut for \Rightarrow which is the prettier $\Rightarrow$?)

Colors

Using the package

\usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}

One can then use \textcolor{red}{this is red} or \color{red} to turn everything red (until next escape).

The predefined colors are:

black, blue, brown, cyan, darkgray, gray, green, lightgray, lime,
magenta, olive, orange, pink, purple, red, teal, violet, white, yellow.

but some of them are horrible! like this horrible #00ff00 pure green (so-called lime) (what it calls lime is even less visible). The svgnames gives access to about 150 additional, and pretty, colors. Use capitals letters. Here are the most useful with a short name:

And here are all of them.

Unicode

Unicode can be supported (at least to some extent) with

\usepackage[mathletters]{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

It works at least for the Greek letters.

Formatting

• Wrapping figures in text: [3]

Lists

• To change spacing between items, put after \begin{itemize}:

\addtolength{\itemsep}{-0.5\baselineskip}

• To change the starting value of an enumerate list (enumii if it's a sublist):

\begin{enumerate} \setcounter{enumi}{4} \item fifth element \end{enumerate}

• To change the type of numbering:

\renewcommand{\theenumi}{\Roman{enumi}}
\renewcommand{\theenumi}{\roman{enumi}}

• To change enumeration (with square brackets, parentheses, etc.): (see [4])

\usepackage{enumitem}% http://ctan.org/pkg/enumitem
\begin{document}
\begin{enumerate}[label={[\arabic*]}]
  \item First item
  \item Second item
  \item \ldots
  \item Last item
\end{enumerate}
\end{document}

Footnotes

There is a $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ package, footmisc, that is useful for manipulating footnote formatting.

• Spacing between footnotes:

%\footnotesep is the space between footnotes: \setlength{\footnotesep}{-0.5\baselineskip}

%\footins is the space between the text body and the footnotes: \setlength{\skip\footins}{1cm}

• To use footnotes to feature reference-style annotations, that is, with no subscripts and with enclosing brackets [1], add in the preamble:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@makefnmark}
%{\@textsuperscript{\textit{\tiny{\@thefnmark}}}}
{[\@thefnmark]}
\renewcommand\@makefntext[1]{%
    \parindent 1em
    \noindent
    [\@thefnmark]\enspace #1}
\makeatother

(I left, commented, the original definition of the footnote).

Geometry

\usepackage[a4paper, total={6in, 8in}]{geometry}

• see [5] or [6].

To use "infinite"-width page to accommodate single-line long formulas, use the package standalone:

\documentclass[border=1in]{standalone}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
    \begin{minipage}{66cm}
    \lipsum[1-150]
    \end{minipage}
\end{document}

This is, unfortunately, incompatible with the RevTeX package or amsmath tools in general. In this case one has to use geometry:

\documentclass[preview, border=1cm]{standalone}
\usepackage[total={50cm, 20cm}]{geometry}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\begin{document}

\begin{subequations}
  \begin{align}
    \sigma_1^{(1)}&=\sqrt{\frac{\gamma_a^4+2\gamma_a^3\Gamma+6\gamma_a^2\Gamma^2+2\gamma_a\Gamma^3+\Gamma ^4}{\gamma_a^2\Gamma^2(\gamma_a+\Gamma)^2}}\\
    ...
  \end{align}
\end{subequations}

\end{document}

Units

We use the siunitx package:

\usepackage{siunitx}

It'd take \SI{500}{\milli\second} to understand.

Please write \SI{10}{\micro\meter} and not 10$\mu\mathrm{m}$

There is also a SIUnits which is however deprecated [7]. Sometimes it comes in handy, for instance when you want to add non-numerical inputs (though siunitx should be able to allow that as well).

To write inverse unit, use \per:

shows the PL emission of a \SI{3}{\micro\meter} wire, where one can
observe the splitting between the two first confined subbands, the
polarization splitting, and the crossing of the X and Y (labelled TE
and TM here) polarized lines around \SI{2.6}{\per\micro\meter},
whereas the value given by the formula above is
\SI{2.1}{\per\micro\meter}.

The powers of ten can be counter-$\mathrm{\LaTeX}$-intuitive:

with a density of $\SI{e-3}{\per\square\micro\meter}$

If you do not use SI units, then omit the slash:

repetition rate of SI{3}{gb/s}

(that would be giga-bits per seconds).

Symbols

To use \mathbb{1} produce the "identity" , use the package

\usepackage{bbold}

Bold letters

Greek letters can be typeset with the bm package

\usepackage{bm}

which produce $\bm{\alpha}$, $\bm{\beta}$, $\bm{\gamma}$ as.

Line numbering

It's useful to number profusely manuscripts of which you are discussing every line. Package lineno does that.

\usepackage{lineno}
\linenumbers

It may have a hard time cohabiting with amsmath, however. It appears that if you include this monstrosity somewhere in your preamble, it'll perform well enough for line-dropping with your co-authors:

\newcommand*\patchAmsMathEnvironmentForLineno[1]{%
  \expandafter\let\csname old#1\expandafter\endcsname\csname #1\endcsname
  \expandafter\let\csname oldend#1\expandafter\endcsname\csname end#1\endcsname
  \renewenvironment{#1}%
     {\linenomath\csname old#1\endcsname}%
     {\csname oldend#1\endcsname\endlinenomath}}% 
\newcommand*\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno[1]{%
  \patchAmsMathEnvironmentForLineno{#1}%
  \patchAmsMathEnvironmentForLineno{#1*}}%
\AtBeginDocument{%
\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno{equation}%
\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno{align}%
\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno{flalign}%
\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno{alignat}%
\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno{gather}%
\patchBothAmsMathEnvironmentsForLineno{multline}%
}

Compilation

Use texfot to get rid of the flood of output generated by compilation and retain only the warnings:

texfot pdflatex Microcavities.tex

See also

• BibTeX to manage references.
• laussy.sty my personal $\mathrm{\TeX}$ definitions.

Links

On this Web

• Options for supplementary material on the arXiv.

Elsewhere on the Internet

• The Comprehensive $\LaTeX$ Symbol List of November 2015 (331 pages of glyphs).