So, I'm self-taught in the art of LaTeX, which means there are some really simple things that I just haven't ever figured out. One thing that I've always wanted to know was how to add to a sort of global preamble where I can add custom declarations and the like that will automatically be included when I render a document. Any thoughts?
You can create your own package to load with \usepackage. In it you can declare functions that you use commonly. If it is in the directory with your source it can be included directly, otherwise if you want to use it for all your documents, put in in your latex distibution folder and run texhash so that the compiler can find it.
Directions can be found in the LaTeX Wikibook or other places I'm sure. I also was a self taught LaTeXer and the Wikibook taught me most of what I needed, along with the short-math-guide and a few package manuals (especially for TikZ/PGF and Beamer).
Related
I'm trying to write a scientific article and the associated supplementary materials entirely in RStudio with rmarkdown.
It seems clear that book down is the way to go to cross-reference between files (https://stackoverflow.com/a/38884378/576684), but I also would like to be able to reference figures produced in one pdf in the other pdf.
Although my latex has got quite rusty with time, I imagine it could be achieved as follows:
compile the article tex and SuppMat tex a first time using rmarkdown::render()
compile these tex files from the command line in order to keep the corresponding .aux file with their references (missing references won't be resolved at this time)
recompile the 2 tex files from the command line another time where all references should now be resolved
Is it a reasonable way to do it? am I overlooking something simpler?
In any case, it requires:
a different numbering of figures in each pdf file (covered by https://stackoverflow.com/a/51337664/576684)
to prevent rmarkdown from trashing the .aux files (it seems that pandoc doesn't allow this, hence the need to create the aux file using standalone latex)
to tell latex to use the additional .aux file if it is found (probably using header-includes: in the YAML header). how can I achieve that?
Thank you very much for your help!
It turns out that the xr package is one way to go: https://texblog.org/2016/08/23/adding-references-from-an-external-file/
so this works from R:
rmarkdown::render("myarticle_ms.Rmd",
bookdown::pdf_book(base_format=rticles::plos_article),
clean=FALSE)
rmarkdown::render("myarticle_SM.Rmd",
bookdown::pdf_book(base_format=rticles::plos_article),
clean=FALSE)
tinytex::pdflatex("myarticle_ms.tex", clean=FALSE)
tinytex::pdflatex("myarticle_SM.tex", clean=FALSE)
tinytex::pdflatex("myarticle_ms.tex")
tinytex::pdflatex("myarticle_SM.tex")
with the following in the YAML header of myarticle_ms.Rmd (and the corresponding one the SuppMat file header):
header-includes:
\usepackage{xr} \externaldocument{myarticle_SM}
Hope it makes life easier for a few others :)
I want to make a small "library" to be used by my future maxima scripts, but I am not quite sure on how to proceed (I use wxMaxima). Maxima's documentation covers the save(), load() and loadFile() functions, yet does not provide examples. Therefore, I am not sure whether I am using the proper/best way or not. My current solution, which is based on this post, stores my library in the *.lisp format.
As a simple example, let's say that my library defines the cosSin(x) function. I open a new session and define this function as
(%i0) cosSin(x) := cos(x) * sin(x);
I then save it to a lisp file located in the /tmp/ directory.
(%i1) save("/tmp/lib.lisp");
I then open a new instance of maxima and load the library
(%i0) loadfile("/tmp/lib.lisp");
The cosSin(x) is now defined and can be called
(%i1) cosSin(%pi/4)
(%o1) 1/2
However, I noticed that a substantial number of the libraries shipped with maxima are of *.mac format: the /usr/share/maxima/5.37.2/share/ directory contains 428 *.mac files and 516 *.lisp files. Is it a better format? How would I generate such files?
More generally, what are the different ways a library can be saved and loaded? What is the recommended approach?
Usually people put the functions they need in a file name something.mac and then load("something.mac"); loads the functions into Maxima.
A file can contain any number of functions. A file can load other files, so if you have somethingA.mac and somethingB.mac, then you can have another file that just says load("somethingA.mac"); load("somethingB.mac");.
One can also create Lisp files and load them too, but it is not required to write functions in Lisp.
Unless you are specifically interested in writing Lisp functions, my advice is to write your functions in the Maxima language and put them in a file, using an ordinary text editor. Also, I recommend that you don't use save to save the functions to a file as Lisp code; just type the functions into a file, as Maxima code, with a plain text editor.
Take a look at the files in share to get a feeling for how other people have gone about it. I am looking right now at share/contrib/ggf.mac and I see it has a lengthy comment header describing its purpose -- such comments are always a good idea.
For principiants, like me,
Menu Edit:configure:Startup commands
Copy all the functions you have verified in the first box (this will write your wxmaxima-init.mac in the location indicated below)
Restart Wxmaxima.
Now you can access the functions whitout any load() command
I'm writing a manual of sorts in LaTeX for some software. I'm constrained to use the article class. I must include docs of individual c++ classes in the manual. I'm looking at doxygen for this, but I've never used doxygen (if there's a better way, let me know).
I can get doxygen to produce a nice LaTeX (--> pdf) file of my entire project. But what I'd like to do is somehow extract the LaTeX source for each class and drop it into my LaTeX manual source at the appropriate place.
I've tried putting all the preamble stuff from refman.tex (generated by doxygen) in my preamble, and then later in the document using \input to include the tex file of an individual class. After cleaning up a few conflicts, I get to one that I don't know how to get past. The doxygen-generated doxygen.sty file makes reference to \chaptermark, but I believe that this is a macro defined in the book class.
So 1.) Am I going about this all the wrong way? 2.)Is it possible to force Doxygen to produce code in the article class? 3.) Anything else?
-garyp
You can make doxygen produce a document that uses the article document class by setting COMPACT_LATEX to YES in your doxygen config file.
I work on a huge script in \latex.
I want to be able to compile each of the chapters as stand-alone, because it is easier for hacking sessions with Latex.
On the other hand, I would like to maintain a document which encompasses the whole script so far written.
I do not know how to maintain both these documents without permanently annoying overhead, as a tex-file can either be written stand-alone or to be included.
It would be great help to have something a Latex-preprocessor available that is capable of C-like #define and #ifdef-#else-#endif statements. This would facilitate writing to a great extent. Do you know whether something like this exists in latex, or how can you do something equivalent? Google hasn't supplied me with a satisfying answer to this.
EDIT:
Some remarks in order to avoid misunderstandings: I am aware of the very simple built-in TEX-preprocessor, but these commands don't work properly as I expected. Hence a reference to these will not help me out.
The chapters in my script shall look something like this (Pseudo-Code)
IF being_just_included defined
%No header here, and document has already begun
ELSE
\input{common_header.tex} %Header things all my documents use
\begin{document}
ENDIF
%%% Lots of stuff
IF being_just_included defined
%Nothing to do here
ELSE
\end{document}
END IF
In contrast, my complete script source file should look like this
\input{common_header.tex}
DEFINE being_just_included
\begin{document}
\input{preamble.tex}
\input{first_chapter.tex}
\input{second_chapter.tex}
\input{third_chapter.tex}
\end{document}
Could you post a code which performs something like this?
Thank you very much for this package and the hint to the forum.
After some time I've figured out there exists a tex preprocessor, which is similar to the CPP. Maybe not well-engineered, but it serves my purpose quite well.
The magic lines are:
\def\justbeingincluded{justbeingincluded}
\ifx\justbeingincluded\undefined
\fi
to be used appropiatly within the respective source files.
One way of doing this is to use the standalone package, intended for this specific purpose.
You may also care to browse through, and perhaps join, TeX and Friends.
I need a way to add text comments in "Word style" to a Latex document. I don't mean to comment the source code of the document. What I want is a way to add corrections, suggestions, etc. to the document, so that they don't interrupt the text flow, but that would still make it easy for everyone to know, which part of the sentence they are related to. They should also "disappear" when compiling the document for printing.
At first, I thought about writing a new command, that would just forward the input to \marginpar{}, and when compiling for printing would just make the definition empty. The problem is you have no guarantee where the comments will appear and you will not be able to distinguish them from the other marginpars.
Any idea?
todonotes is another package that makes nice looking callouts. You can see a number of examples in the documentation.
Since LaTeX is a text format, if you want to show someone the differences in a way that they can use them (and cherry pick from them) use the standard diff tool (e.g., diff -u orig.tex new.tex > docdiffs). This is the best way to annotate something like LaTeX documents, and can be easily used by anyone involved in the production of a document from LaTeX sources. You can then use standard LaTeX comments in your patch to explain the changes, and they can be very easily integrated. If the document lives in a version control system of some sort, just use the VCS to generate a patch file that can be reviewed.
I have used changes.sty, which gives basic change colouring:
\added{new text}
\deleted{old text}
\replaced{new text}{old text}
All of these take an optional parameter with the initials of the author who did this change. This results in different colours used, and these initials are displayed superscripted after the changed text.
\replaced[MI]{new text}{old text}
You can hide the change marks by giving the option final to the changes package.
This is very basic, and comments are not supported, but it might help.
My little home-rolled "fixme" tool uses \marginpar where possible and goes inline in places (like captions) where that is hard to arrange. This works out because I don't often use margin paragraphs for other things. This does mean you can't finalize the layout until everything is fixed, but I don't feel much pain from that...
Other than that I heartily agree with Michael about using standard tools and version control.
See also:
Tips for collaboratively editing a LaTeX document (which addresses you main question...)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/193298/best-practices-in-latex
and a self-plug:
How do I get Emacs to fill sentences, but not paragraphs?
You could also try the trackchanges package.
You can use the changebar package to highlight areas of text that have been affected.
If you don't want to do the markup manually (which can be tedious and interrupt the flow of editing) the neat latexdiff utility will take a diff of your document and produce a version of it with markup added to visually display the changes between the two versions in the typeset output.
This would be my preferred solution, although I haven't tested it out on large, multi-file documents.
The best package I know is Easy Review that provides the commenting functionality into LaTeX environment. For example, you can use the following simple commands such as \add{NEW TEXT}, \remove{OLD TEXT}, \replace{OLD TEXT}{NEW TEXT}, \comment{TEXT}{COMMENT}, \highlight{TEXT}, and \alert{TEXT}.
Some examples can be found here.
The todonotes package looks great, but if that proves too cumbersome to use, a simple solution is just to use footnotes (e.g. in red to separate them from regular footnotes).
Package trackchanges.sty works exactly the way changes.sty. See #Svante's reply.
It has easy to remember commands and you can change how edits will appear after compiling the document. You can also hide the edits for printing.