The Beginner LaTeX Files pt.1

If you missed the intro post for this series, I’m fairly new to using LaTeX and I’m in the process of my first big project that uses it extensively.  I’m posting about the learning curve into LaTeX in the hopes that it will show both myself and others how useful and accessible professional typesetting for scientific documents can be.

 

In the last few days there was one stumbling block, one ongoing problem.  The great thing about stumbling blocks is that their solution tend to knock out several problems at once.  Today the realization showed me how different environments help organize one’s document. 

 

 Environments are what you use every time you switch from text to an equation and back, or when you make a table.  Until recently I had only used an environment to start a table, formula or figure, but combining more than one of these is where things become powerful.  A simple example of this could be making a table of images or putting regular text inside a formula.  

 

I had to use this to do both of these things.  Neat tables of images can be a hard thing to get in word processors, but is quite easy in TeX.  The advantage is even greater since the document you edit doesn’t have the actual images in it, so no matter how many images are in your document and no matter how long you document is, nothing ever slows down.  Ever seen somebody write a 300 page thesis with huge diagrams on every other page, using MS Word?  It’s a disaster. 

 

The other similar thing I had to do was add a comment to an equation.  This is usually a bad idea since you should describe formulae in the regular text, but I wanted to point out how two similar things were different and it was more obvious to do by commenting in the formula.  Comments are easy in tables and figures, but to do it in an equation you have to revert to another environment; a regular text environment.  

 

This give you things like this.

 

 

The more general problem I’ve had is also more difficult to figure out.  I’m a totally crazy organized programmer.  People have told me that my computer code looks like it came out of a book because of how I write things out.  i haven’t found a good way to do this in LaTeX yet and it’s driving me a little bananas.  My guess is that I need to use a ton more space than I’m using right now, but I’m far from figuring out a system that works well for me.  

 

Suggestions are always welcome, but this may be something I have to teach myself.