Formatting

The Problem with TikZ 3D’s Drawing Planes TikZ 3d provides simple commands for drawing on the xy, yz, and zx planes, but lacks built-in support for arbitrary planes. This can make depicting concepts on non-standard planes challenging. The default coordinate system in TikZ 3d is restricted to the cardinal planes, limiting the flexibility and expressiveness…

The process of manually formatting tables in LaTeX can be an exercise in frustration. The tedious and error-prone task of adjusting column widths, borders, captions, and alignment to produce professional results often leads authors to procrastinate or settle for subpar rendering. Fortunately, packages exist to automate the table generation process and relieve authors of this…

Automating Document Customization with Conditionals LaTeX conditionals provide a powerful method for automatically customizing documents for different audiences and outputs without needing to maintain separate source files. Conditional commands allow authors to segment content blocks and select whether to display or hide them based on Boolean flags. This facilitates streamlining documents for different users such…

Troubleshooting LaTeX Build Errors When compiling a LaTeX document, errors and warnings are often printed to the log file. By carefully examining these log entries, the underlying issues can be identified and fixed. Identifying Common LaTeX Errors and Warnings Some frequent LaTeX errors include: Missing package errors – Occur when LaTeX encounters a command defined…

Getting Started with LaTeX LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting software used to produce professional documents with aesthetically pleasing formatting. To begin using LaTeX, you first need to install a LaTeX distribution on your computer. Popular options include MiKTeX on Windows and MacTeX on macOS. These distributions come bundled with all the core LaTeX packages and…

The Problem of Tedious Front and Back Matter LaTeX allows for beautiful typesetting of documents, but manually specifying repetitive document elements like title pages, tables of contents, bibliographies, and the like can become extremely tedious and error-prone, especially for longer documents. For academic works, handling elements such as bibliographies and citation call-outs according to a…

Simplifying Unnumbered Sections LaTeX allows authors to create unnumbered sections to organize content without adding numbers that could potentially clutter documents. Unnumbered sections enable manual control over specifying sections without automatic numbering. Common use cases for unnumbered sections include abstracts, prefaces, and transitions between numbered sections. Defining unnumbered sections involves LaTeX commands like \section*{}, \subsection*{},…

Properly Formatting Less Than and Greater Than Symbols When including less than () symbols in LaTeX documents, proper formatting is essential for ensuring the symbols are displayed correctly when compiled. There are two main methods for including these symbols: escaping them by preceding with a backslash when used in regular text, and using math mode…

When to Use Display Math Display math formatted with LaTeX’s built-in math environments like “equation” is optimal for presenting important mathematical concepts, formulas, equations, and multi-line expressions to readers. Using display math improves the readability of technical documents in situations where inline math with single dollar signs would be too small or cramped for clear…

Handling Special Characters in LaTeX LaTeX uses backslashes to mark special characters and commands. This means certain characters like backslashes and ampersands need to be escaped with an additional backslash in order for LaTeX to process them correctly. The Core Issue – Escaping In LaTeX, the backslash (“\”) character is used to denote commands and…