Use 260330-1938 LaTeX paper final checklist at the end!

• References
  • Natbib reference sheet
  • Symbols
    • “The great, big list of LaTeX symbols”(PDF)
    • LaTeX/Mathematics - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

EDIT: this is becoming a more generic thingy for everything I’d ever need to refer to when writing a paper, TODO clean this at some point.

Resources – DREAM Lab links to https://dream.cs.umass.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Tips-and-Best-Practices.pdf. Until I set up a system to save PDF info, I’ll paste it as screenshots here:

ChatGPT summarized the relevant pages of the PDF file thus, but didn’t do it well, mostly rewriting myself:

General Formatting

• \emph{} is better than \textit{} always, and supports nesting.
• Smart Quotes: Use `x’ and ``x’’ for single and double quotes respectively.
• Large Numbers: Write large numbers as 54{,}000.
• Word Breaking: Use - to suggest hyphenation points in long words, including ones that already have hyphens inside them. Such words are likely to go over margins etc.: multi-discipli\-nary
  • EDIT: If I don’t want a word to get broken, use mbox: \caption{Worldwide distribution of \mbox{plantNaturalist-}500k}¹
  • EDIT2: the extdash package is even better, same link
  • EDIT3: If you want to allow linebreaks somewhere but without a dash and only if needed, it’s long\allowbreak word²
• Overflow Lines: \begin{sloppypar}... for paragraphs where latex goes over the margin.
• Float Positioning: Place figures and tables at the top of the page for readability: \begin{figure}[t]
• Center Align Floats: Use \centering for aligning tables and figures.

Specific Elements

• Non-Breaking Space: Use the tilde (~) to keep words together, including always
  • before citations: sth~\cite{whatever}
  • after numbers in text
  • before figure/section references
• Emphasize vs. Bold: Prefer \emph over bold or \textit.

Macros

• Macros: Create macros for things that will be changed later, such as DATASET NAMES, or things tedious to type like MODEL NAMES .
• \newcommand{\system}{SQuID\xspace} for auto-space
  • \xspace guesses whether to add a space or not, \usepackage{xspace}. May fail in unexpected places.
  • Explicit is always better: \system{} or \system\ manually adds a space.

\newcommand{\llama}{Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct}
\newcommand{\mistral}{Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-Instruct-2503}

Two models, \llama{} and \mistral. % note spacing!

Spacing and Sizing

• Paragraph Spacing: Use \smallskip, \medskip, and \bigskip, instead of \vspace
• Line and Text Width: Use fractions of \linewidth or \textwidth.
• Resizing Tables/Figures: Use \resizebox with appropriate dimensions.

Compression hacks

• (see pictures)
• Make spaces smaller around lists:

\begin{itemize}
  \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}
  \setlength{\parskip}{0pt}

• huggingface.co can become hf.co in footnotes!

Paper writing hacks

Even more

Non-breaking spaces

best practices - When should I use non-breaking space? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange lists ALL the places where Knuth wanted people to put nonbreaking spaces, incl:

• 1)~one 2)~two
• Donald~E. Knuth
• 1,~2
• Chapter~12

Less obvious and not from him:

• I~am

Also:

• before all cites, refs
• … and inlined equations

Citations

• ChatGPT says that citations should come before footnotes to prioritize the scholarly source over unimportant info.
  • So this [32] ³ and not this³ [32].
  • Also: avoid footnotes after integers, they look like powers.
• Citations go before the last period of the sentence, but within parentheses.
• Natbib reference sheet:
  • \citep{} aka \cite{} for inside Parentheses thing *(Bob, 2043)*
    • \citealp{} : sentence (as *Bob, 2032*, said)
  • \citet{} for citations inside Text: *Bob (2032)* says that ...
    • \citealt{} for removes parentheses: *Bob 2032* (no comma!)

References (cleveref)

• \cref > \autoref > vanilla\ref
• \usepackage[capitalise, nameinlink, noabbrev]{cleveref} is usually what I want
  • nameinlink makes Figure ... linked as well, not just the number
  • noabbrev for Figure instead of Fig.
  • capitalise for uppercase by default, without it \Cref does it manually.
    • \Cref for beginning of sentence \cref otherwise is good karma regardless of capitalise
• Appendixes will be called Appendix if you add \crefalias{section}{appendix} before they start⁴
• Documentation:
  • https://ctan.project-creative.net/macros/latex/contrib/cleveref/cleveref.pdf

Other bits

• I sometimes write and around ~50% forgetting that ~ is a nbsp — hard to catch when reading the text.

• As when writing code I like to add some assert False (or a failing test) so that I know where I stopped the last time, \latexstopcompiling here is a neat way to make sure I REALLY finis ha certain line I started but not finished.

• \clearpage (maybe a couple) for a new page

• Use the xurl package, it’s it’s basically url but adds neat line breaks. \url{my-long-url-thingy.com}

Useful snippets

My favourite TODO command

% \newcommand{\TODO}[1]{{\color{magenta}\textbf{#1}}}
\newcommand{\TODO}[1]{{\color{magenta}#1}}

EDIT: the todonotes package is a thing! https://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/todonotes/todonotes.pdf TODO use its much better options

Quick environment for informal lists etc.

When starting a paper I usually add a first section with references/checklists, that gets deleted before submission. This makes it easy to write

% disables parindent, makes latex follow newlines
\newenvironment{META}{%
    \setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
    \obeylines
	\footnotesize % or not
}{%
    % group closes automatically
}

Sample usage:

\section*{Meta/TODO} \begin{META}
Things I need to remember:
- do x
- do y
--- and y1
--- and y1
- delete this section
\end{META}
\section{Introduction}

Same through groups

\def\TODO{\begingroup
\color{magenta}
\bfseries
}
\def\noTODO{\endgroup}

% then
\TODO here's my text, supports enumerations etc. inside as well! \noTODO Back to normal

Obeylines for simple newlines

(From https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/153540)

\bgroup\obeylines
Here line breaks
are respected.
\egroup
Here they
are not.

Auto titlecaps

(Don’t remember where from)

\usepackage{titlecaps}
\Addlcwords{the and but or nor for a an at by to in on with of}
\let\oldsubsection\subsection
\renewcommand{\subsection}[1]{\oldsubsection{\titlecap{#1}}}
% also section etc.

Saving space

TODO

% remove spacing before itemize
\usepackage{enumitem}

% https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/23313/how-can-i-reduce-padding-after-figure
% \setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{-2ex} % default is 0
\setlength{\abovecaptionskip}{0pt} % default is 10

% don't change indent
\usepackage[skip=0pt, indent]{parskip}

Circled numbers

\usepackage{circledsteps}

% then for circled 3 do eg.
\Circled{3}

Make wide tables fit in the page

\begin{table*}[t]
\centering
\small
\begin{adjustbox}{max width=\textwidth}
\begin{tabular}{l  c c c c }

Make minted listings use the same font for “Listing” in the caption

\usepackage{caption}

% This ensures lstlisting uses the standard caption style
\captionsetup[lstlisting]{
    format=plain,
    % Adjust labelfont and textfont to match your document class
    % Common options: bf (bold), sc (small caps), it (italic)
    labelfont=bf, 
    textfont=normalfont,
    singlelinecheck=false
}

Colored boxes

\usepackage[many]{tcolorbox}
% ...
\begin{tcolorbox}[title=Box title,colframe=darkgray,colback=blue!5!white,arc=0pt,fonttitle=\bfseries]
\end{tcolorbox}

Footnotes in tables

Just use \dag, \ddag and manually add to caption. DON’T FORGET ABOUT THEM!

Symbols

• “The great, big list of LaTeX symbols”(PDF) with an ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT COVER. h/t to overleaf
• LaTeX/Mathematics - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Misc

• https://allanj.github.io/blog/2022/paper-writing/ is a page similar to this one, higher abstraction though. Many bits on condensing

TODO / more

• we’ll -> we will
• e.g., i.e.: always preceded by comma and followed by comma
  • (in American English, as in ‘for example’, and ’that is’), but not British English.
  • Somewhere I read that e.g. has commas if your list of examples has more than one, damn tha twould have been nice :(