LaTeX¶
Overleaf¶
Overleaf.com is a collaborative latex editor. In its free version it has a very limited disk space. However it comes with a Rich text mode that allows you to edit the document in a preview mode. The free templates provided do not include ACM template, put you are allowed to use the OSA template.
Features of overleaf are documented at: https://www.overleaf.com/benefits
jabref¶
Jabref is a very simple to use bibliography manager for LaTeX and other systems. It cand create a multitude of bibliography file formats and allows upload in other online bibliography managers.
Video: https://youtu.be/cMtYOHCHZ3k
Video with cc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVbifcLgMic
jabref and MSWord¶
Accordung to Colin Thornburg it is possible to integrate jabref references directly into MSWord. THi has been conducted on a Windows computer. All you need to do is following theses steps.
- Create Jabref bibliography just like in presented in the jabref video
- After finishing adding your sources in Jabref, click File -> export
- Name your bibliography and choose MS Office 2007(*.xml) as the file format. Remember the location of where you saved your file.
- Open up your word document. If you are using the ACM template, go ahead and remove the template references listed under Section 7. References
- In the MS Word ribbon choose ‘References’
- Choose ‘Manage Sources’
- Click ‘Browse’ and locate/select your Jabref xml file
- You should now see your references appear in the left side window. Select the references you want to add to your document and click the ‘copy’ button to move them from the left side window to the right window.
- Click the ‘Close’ button
- In the MS Word Ribbon, select ‘Bibliography’ under the References tab
- Click ‘Insert Bibliography’ and your references should appear in the document
- Ensure references are of Style: IEEE. Styles are located in the References tab under ‘Manage Sources’
As you can see there is some effort involve, so we do recommend you use LaTeX as you can focus there on content rather than dealing with comlex layout decissions. THi sis especially true, if your papers has figures or tables.
References¶
- The LaTeX Reference Manual provides a good intriduction to Latex.
LaTeX is available on all modern computer systems. A very good instalation for OSX is available at:
However, if you have older versions on your systems you may have to first completely uninstall them.
Introduction¶
Mastering a text processing system is an essential part of a researchers life. Not knowing how to use a text processing system can slow down the productivity of research drastically.
The information provided here is not intended to replace one of the many text books available about LaTeX. For the beginning you might be just fine with the documentation provided here. For serious users I recommend to purchase a book. Examples for books include
- LaTeX Users and Reference Guide, by Leslie Lamport
- LaTeX an Introduction, by Helmut Kopka
- The LaTeX Companion, by Frank Mittelbach
If you do not want to buy a book you can find a lot of useful information in the LaTeX refrence manual.
Manual pages and programs¶
Following programs are useful for using LaTeX. To most of them you will find also manual pages:
- pdflatex: the latex program producing pdf
- bibtex: to create bibliographies
- jabref: less fancy GUI to bibtex files
The LaTeX Cycle¶
Create/edit ASCII source file with file.tex file:
emacs file.tex
Create/edit bibliography file:
jabref refs.bib
Create the PDF:
pdflatex file
bibtex file
pdflatex file
pdflatex file
View the PDF:
open file
On OSX the best PDF viewer for LaTeX is skim:
Generating Images¶
To produce high quality images the programs PowerPoint and omnigraffle on OSX are recommended. When using powerpoint please keep the image ratio to 4x3 as they produce nice sze graphics whoch you also can use in your presentations. When using other rations they may not fit in presentations and thus you may increase unnecessarily your work. We do not recommend vizio as it is not universally available.
Editing LaTeX¶
The text editor emacs provides a good basis for editing TeX and LaTex documents. Both modes are supported. In addition there exists a color highlight module enableling the color display of LaTeX and TeX commands. On OSX aquaemacs and carbon emacs have build in support for LaTeX. Spell checking is done with flyspell in emacs.
Other editors such as TeXshop are available which provide a more integrated experience.
However when using skim in conjunction with imacs and latexmk your PDF view will be automatically updated once you save the file in emacs. This provides a very good quasy WYSIWYG environment.
I have made very good experiences with Lyx. You must assure that the team you work with uses it consistently and that you all use the same version.
Using the ACM templates is documented here:
On OSX it is important that you have a new version of LaTeX and Lyx installed. As it takes up quite some space, you ma want to delete older versions. The new version of LyX comes with the acmsigplan template included. However on OSX and other platforms the .cls file is not included by default. However the above link clearly documents how to fix this.
How to edit Bibliographies?¶
It is a waste of your time to edit bibliographies with the bibitem environment. There are several preformated styles available. It includes also styles for ACM and IEEE bibliographies. For the ACM style we recommend that you replace abbrv.bst with abbrvurl.bst, add hyperref to your usepackages so you can also display urls in your citations:
\bibliographystyle{abbrvurl}
\bibliography{references.bib}
Than you have to run latex and bibtex in the following order:
latex file
bibtex file
latex file
latex file
The reason for the multiple execution of the latex program is to update all cross-references correctly. In case you are not interested in updating the library every time in the writing progress just postpone it till the end. Missing citations are viewed as [?].
Two programs stand out when manageing bibliographies: emacs and jabref:
How to produce Slides?¶
Slides are best produced with the seminar package:
\documentclass{seminar}
\begin{slide}
Hello World on slide 1
\end{slide}
The text between slides is ignored
\begin{slide}
Hello World on slide 2
\end{slide}