About Me

• Academic for over a decade (PhD in CS involving logic).
• Researcher in Visual Languages and Visual Reasoning.
• Shipped code in Haskell, C, Java, Perl, Python, C++, JavaScript & others.
• Director of an Eastbourne not-for-profit TechResort.
• Founder of a submarine-mode startup.

Document Preparation

• I'm good with source code.
• I do source control.
• I require good support for math formulae.
• I need source code snippets.
• I need excellent bibliography support.
• Cross-reference support is necessary.

Source Code

\documentclass{article}

\title{Something}
\author{Aidan}

\begin{document}
My first document.
\end{document}

Source Control

commit e71a29bef2cf2a4f9e3584c297c99285bcf16435
Author: Aidan Delaney <aidan@ontologyengineering.org>
Date:   Thu Jan 21 10:08:08 2016 +0000

    Enabled beamer output with automagic conversion of SVG to PDF/PNG etc...

commit cef2fe4fdf21145d3565d816fba0eb1389532990
Author: Aidan Delaney <aidan@ontologyengineering.org>
Date:   Mon Jan 18 09:59:57 2016 +0000

    Added KTP presentation to index.

commit 51a3c731d492622fe2c44eb037ece6de57e3bbce
Author: Aidan Delaney <aidan@ontologyengineering.org>
Date:   Mon Jan 18 09:56:37 2016 +0000

    Reveal.js bump

Mathematics Support

I might need inline \(e^{\pi i}=-1\) equations.

Or something in a block: \[ \bigcup\limits_{z\in MZ(d)}\Psi(z) = \emptyset \]

Or even something much more complicated: \[ f^\prime(s^\prime)=\left\{ \begin{array}{cr} (k,(in\cup\{l\},out))&\textrm{where }\eta(\pi^{-1}(s^\prime))\in\Psi(in\cup\{l\},out)\\ (k,(in,out\cup\{l\}))&\textrm{where }\eta(\pi^{-1}(s^\prime))\in\Psi(in,out\cup\{l\}) \end{array} \right. \]

Source Code Snippits

/**
 * Calculates the points of intersection.
 */
protected Collection<Point2D>
           intersectionPoints(SplitArcBoundary other) {
  Collection<Point2D> ixs = new HashSet<Point2D>();
  for(CircleArc2D a1 : this.curves) {
    for(CircleArc2D a2 : other.curves) {
      Optional<Collection<Point2D>> is =
              nonTangentalIntersections(a1, a2);
      if(is.isPresent()) {
        ixs.addAll(is.get());
      }
    }
  }
  return ixs;
}

Bibliography Support

I need to cite papers from a database (Croucher et al. 2014).

Cross-referencing

{#fig:description}

Cross reference to (???).

LibreOffice & Google Docs

• I'm good with source code -- neither are source code.
• I do source control -- neither support my standard workflow.
• I require good support for math formulae -- it's passable in both, but not great.
• I need source code snippets -- uugh!
• I need excellent bibliography support -- both are too complex.
• Cross-reference support is necessary -- YMMV.

Writing your first LaTeX file

\documentclass{article}

\title{Something}
\author{Aidan}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
My first document.
\end{document}

Compiling your LaTeX document

There are a number of differing compilers. Just use pdflatex.

$ pdflatex myfile.tex

Citing work

\documentclass{article}

\title{Something}
\author{Aidan}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
My first document cites some work \cite{mykey}

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibibliography{mybibfile}

\end{document}

Adding lists

We have three types of list enumerate, itemize and description:

\begin{itemize}
  \item A list item
  \item Another list item
\end{itemize}

The begin and end blocks mark the start and end of an environment.

Adding sections

\section{Section Title}

Note it's not a begin & end environment.

Adding images

People argue far too much with images in LaTeX. Here's the skinny -- Use Inkscape to draw any images you require as SVG. Alternatively download images as PNG or JPEG.

\begin{figure}
  \begin{center} % Note Yanqui spelling
    \includegraphics{images/foo} % no extension
    \caption[width=0.8\textwidth]{A figure caption}
    \label{fig:foo}
  \end{center}
\end{figure}

But first you need to use the graphicx package.

Adding tables

Tables are a PITA (Note again the use of figure, caption and label.

\begin{figure}
  \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{l|l|l|l|l|l|l|l|}
    &a&b&aa&ab&ba&aba&aab\\\hline
    a&aa&ab&aa&aab&aba&aab&aab\\
    b&ba&b&aab&ba&ba&aab&aab\\
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{A table of stuff}
    \label{tab:stuff}
  \end{center}
\end{figure}

Cross References

Any \label{x} can be referenced with a \ref{x}.

Working with \(\LaTeX\)

• If you're fighting \(\LaTeX\) then you're probably wrong, work with it, not against it.
• Don't hard position figures until the document is completely finished.
• Don't try and save space (eg: respect a page limit) until the document is completely finished.
• Remember that your content is always more important than the tools you use to develop it.

The Twist

• LaTeX is often used in source code comments.
• This presentation was not written in :)
• the magic of pandoc, or
• the power of markup.

Thank You

• To you, for giving up your time.