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Tips for LaTeX Academic Writing

General

  • Always leave a whitespace after a punctuation, and between a letter and a bracket, e.g. "word (a)" and "reference [1]". NO whitespace before a punctuation.
  • When referring to a section, table, figure, equation, or algorithm, the first letter should be capitalised. For example, "Section I, Table II, Figure 4, Eq. (3)".

Mathematical Notations/Equations

  • Always put mathematical symbols and equations into math environment.
  • Examples of in-line math environment include $a$, $b+1$, and $y = 2x+3$.
  • Examples of standalone math environment include \begin{equation} y = x + z \end{equation}.
  • When using words in notations, better to use \textit{text} rather than $text$. This will give you smaller separation between letters in the word.
  • When using multiple letters in superscript or subscript, remember to use {}, e.g. $x_{rt}$.
  • Keep the style consistant for different types of notations. For example, use lowercase letters (e.g. x, a) as scalars, boldface lowercase symbols (e.g. \boldsymbol{x}) as vectors, and uppercase letters (e.g. A, X) as matrices.

\label and \ref

Whenever there is a need for reference, such as referring to a Section, a Table, a Figure, and an Algorithm, always use \label and \ref.

Example:

\section{Referred Section} \label{referredsection}

This is somewhere else where you want to refer to the referred section by Section \ref{referredsection}.

Tables

  • Use \begin{table}[!ht] for the best layout.
  • For printing a wide table in a double-column template, use \begin{table*}[!ht].
  • Use \footnotesize can reduce the font size in the table a bit, but still clear to see.
  • A good guide to make nice tables: "https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/markusp/teaching/guides/guide-tables.pdf".
  • For printing results, always try to create LaTeX tables automatically using script, rather than typing the results manually. Scripting the tables can save time, and remove the potential typing error.
  • If you write scripts to process your result data, you can print the processed results in the format of LaTeX table.
  • If your processed data is an Excel spreadsheet, you can transform it into LaTeX table source code using this Excel add-on: https://github.com/krlmlr/Excel2LaTeX. Or Google "Excel to LaTeX".

Figures

  • Use \begin{figure}[!ht] for the best layout.
  • For printing a wide figure in a double-column template, use \begin{figure*}[!ht].
  • For printing subfigures in a figure, can use \usepackage{subfig} \usepackage{caption}, and use the \subfloat command.

An example:

\begin{figure}[!ht]

\centering

\subfloat[first caption.\label{fig:1a}]{\includegraphics[width=0.2\textwidth]{fig1a}}\hfill

\subfloat[second caption.\label{fig:1b}] {\includegraphics[width=0.185\textwidth]{fig1b}}\hfill

\subfloat[third caption.\label{fig:1c}]{\includegraphics[width=0.2\textwidth]{fig1c}}

\caption{General caption.} \label{fig:1}

\end{figure}