LaTeX

Editors

• LyX, a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor useful for quick math writing.

Citation management

• Zotero for local and remote bibliography management.

• Zotero connector for Zotero integration in browsers.

• bibtex vs biblatex vs biber vs natbib to understand the differences.

• MRLookup has a nice search engine to get verified citations for many peer-reviewed publications. You can get BibTeX formatted exports. Many journals require the MR number, so you can find them using that tool. Also, check out Abbreviations of Names of Serials if you want the abbreviated version of journal names.

Editing equations

• Use the \left and \right commands near brackets and parens to automatically size them (i.e. outer brackets will be made larger than inner brackets).
• The align environment will add a tag to each line as a separate equation. Using split within an equation or align will assign one label to all lines.
• You can use the \tag command to edit the number next to an equation
  • \tag{Hi Rob} will change an equation label from “(1)” to “(Hi Rob)”
  • This can be a useful, if somewhat hacky, way to add commentary to multiline equations
• The \label command assigns an internal keyword which is used in referencing via \ref or \cref, whereas \tag will change the actual label that appears in the output.

Referencing equations/figures

• The \Cref command will automatically determine what is being referenced based on the type of the object that was labelled. For example, \ref{mylabel} will display as “Equation (1)” if \label{mylabel} is next an equation and “Figure (1)” if \label{mylabel} is close to a figure.
• \autoref does something similar, but depends on a specific convention within the label. For example, you need to prepend an eq: so \autoref{eq:mylabel} will show up as “Equation (1)”.

Some tips and tricks

• Check out Detexify to find the correct math symbol by drawing it.

• Check out the todonotes package to add todo notes and comments to LaTeX files and pdf output.

• Use include or input to insert the content of another .tex file where you want it. For example, you can maintain a math macro file that you use often or organize your sections/chapters in different files. Also, read When should I use \input vs. \include?.