Research Tutorial

How To: Tips and Tricks in Latex

This page is a collection of tricks I use to get my latex publishing going.

How to Shrink Your Paper / Thesis:

When you’re submitting papers to conferences or journals, often there is a page restriction. However, you might not find it appropriate to remove content as it can screw up your paper. I suggest using half-size / half-point fonts to make minor adjustments to font size. This can really affect the overall length of your paper. Here’s how you do it, by  changing your \begin{document} line to the following:

\begin{document}\fontsize{9.5}{11.5}\rm

The first value “9.5” is the font size, the second value should be 1.2 times the first value (don’t ask me why!).

I found an excellent article here with more tips.

How to Setup TeXstudio in Mac:

Here is a screenshot of my TexStudio configuration page on my mac. It is as complete as I need it to be write my papers (IEEE conferences and journals). You may need to change the paths in the settings to where your latex executables are (for example mine are in /opt/local/bin) .

 

texmak

How to get Nomenclature:
I found this link to be really useful:
 How to choose Latex Editor:
1. Ubuntu: Use Kile, it is hands down the best according to me.
2. Mac: Use TexStudio, found it easy to setup, the UI is great and the pdf viewer works well. I wouldn’t use anything else. Texmaker is good too, but TexStudio is an advanced fork of Texmaker, so use the old!
How to publish Latex files to Arxiv:
Arxiv complains a lot about compiling your tex files. Its very simple to fix, you can start by changing your pre-amble to look like this:


\documentclass[letterpaper, conference, 10pt,twocolumn ]{IEEEtran}
\pdfoutput=1
\let\chapter\section

Good luck with your next paper!

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