LaTex

Other than writing research papers, what do you guys use LaTex for? I recall some user's on here saying they actually put their lecture notes or example problems in LaTex. Worth it or autistic? Any other tips for using LaTex to make math life easier?

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I use it for making notes on Anki a lot. Being able to make flash cards for certain concepts and equations is neat to have in addition to reinforcing with problem sets. It's also great for making your own custom notes. Say you have several textbooks that you want to learn from, you simply take what's best out of all of them and transcribe into a LaTeX document, equations and all. It's like writing your own textbook

Revision notes - it really helps to keep things organised around exam time.

If you are going to be writing papers in LaTeX, getting practice by writing your notes in LaTeX is good anyway. You will eventually be able to type in TeX about as fast as you type normally. I have bad handwriting, so I like typing my notes, and when I took classes like model theory or commutative algebra, something which uses a lot of different alphabets (fracturs, script, greek, etc.), it became really helpful to be able to type things using the right symbols straight away.

Then you will also have a bank of code to copy and paste stuff from when you go to write that paper or type that homework assignment.

I use it for my shit short stories, specially the xelatex version

Thankfully, most higher year students at my university use it to write their homework (without being forced to do so). It's a breath of fresh air after teaching first semester students.

I use it for any assignment / homework / report / project I need to write.

I actually cried of laughter when I saw people writing their bachelor thesis with Word.

Lmao.

>I actually cried of laughter when I saw people writing their bachelor thesis with Word.
If you're not taking advantage of LaTeX's built-in mathematical typesetting there's zero reason to use LaTeX to typeset a thesis.

>Bachelor of science without mathematical formula involved

kek

The amount of control you have over your latex document makes it an advantedge. Try styling a front page in Word, Open Office or something like that it's a nightmare.

>Bachelor of science without mathematical formula involved
Molecular biology easily fills this requirement.

>Try styling a front page in Word, Open Office or something like that it's a nightmare.
Try altering a *TeX style sheet to make it do something it was never designed to do. It's a nightmare.

*TeX is certainly amazing, but it's not a one size fits all solution.

>Molecular biology

topkek

Regardless of your opinion of the subject, it's a valid falsification of your original post.

Furthermore, you never specified a BS thesis in the original post. You said "typeset a thesis". That could cover anything from math to science to art history.

It's quite easy to ask how to do something on tex.se though, people have almost always already defined a ton of commands or packages to do what you want because someone else wanted it already.

i study biomedical engineering and whenever we evaluate experiments (reports is the english word for it?!) latex is pretty handy. it's great for equations and having a fixed format.
table of contents is also pretty easy.

outside of that i don't write many documents, but have noticed latex replacing word/office more and more.

pretty much doing the equations and having pdfs was the main selling point.

texmaker has a "new documents creating assistent" or whatever, so that helps with the commands to set the paper to A4 and initial formating like that. any other small problems can be googled easily until you memories the few commands you need from repition.

you should just try it out and see if it fits you or not.

...

>Molecular biology easily fills this requirement.
This is bait, right? Thing is I really don't know nowadays with all the freshman rats crawling around Veeky Forums, there might be people this dumb.

Equation sheets
Homeworks (it's been a while since I've done that)
And notes.

> Any other tips for using LaTex to make math life easier?
learn what every command and subcommand you use does, instead of just copy pasting
Basic LaTeX is pretty easy...reading packages is much harder.

Very nice for lab reports and other project papers. If you have a lot of figures that need to be updated, you can just run all the code once, then hit compile, and everything gets updated.

I have no idea how to do this in Word or Google Docs, so whenever I do have to use these for lab reports, I have to be very careful about when I start including figures, otherwise I wind up having to updated a mess of shit by hand.

I wish Facebook supported latex.

Not bait. It's a bachelor's of science degree, and it's quite easy to complete a non-trivial research project without needing to typeset anything mathematical.

>Any other tips for using LaTex to make math life easier?
Texmaker is really beginner friendly, it has auto fill so you don't need to memorise commands (but you will accidentally as you keep using [math]\LaTeX[/math]).

Just type in [math]\LaTeX[/math] there, anyone who uses it will understand what you've written anyway.

I wish Gmail supported latex so my advisor would stop emailing me things like

(k[V] otimes k[alpha^{+/-1}, beta^{+/-1}] otimes \prod_{Z/3 x Z/3} k)^H.

in plaintext.

You can just compile it very quickly here:
mathb.in/

>anyone who uses it will understand what you've written anyway
Its a pain to read though

Really? I regularly converse with lecturers/supervisors with it and they've replied back in the same way. IIRC, in first year we were encouraged to do so too since people could read it anyway.

Agreed. Not to undervalue Lay's Tech but Unicode would be perfectly viable for a LOT of casual use if it was equally easy to input everywhere.

You need to practice more. My advisor does that all the time and I don't even see the code anymore. It just goes directly into my brain. Compiling it is purely cosmetic.

I can understand why it would be encouraged to get used to it simply because you'll need to produce it a lot. But it's hard to argue that it's slower to read than it needs to be. That's my opinion at least.

Usually it's readable, if you've written a lot of TeX.
fractions are always a pain, and some weirdos add lots of weird spacing to their code.

I'm usually on mobile so I have to read raw LaTeX anyway.

I do converse with my supervisor in a latexish way, leaving out certain things to make it more readable. Like i would write dy/dx instead of \frac{dy}{dx}

Agreed, it's definitely slower for sure, but I guess it's only a problem if you converse with peers in LaTeX a lot (in which case compiling all the time would be annoying).
However, there is sharelatex.com/ for real-time collaborations.

Yeah, there are some things that you leave out since it's nicer for them.
I wouldn't write \int^b_a f(x) \mathop{\mathrm{d}x} for example (gives nicer spacing: [math]\int^b_a f(x) \mathop{\mathrm{d}x}[/math]) compared to \int^b_a f(x)dx (which is [math]\int^b_a f(x) \mathop{\mathrm{d}x}[/math]).

Messed up the comparison there (accidentally just copied and pasted).
Again:
[eqn]\int^b_a f(x) \mathop{\mathrm{d}x}[/eqn]
\int^b_a f(x) \mathop{\mathrm{d}x}
vs.
[eqn]\int^b_a f(x)dx[/eqn]
\int^b_a f(x)dx[

I've used it to make posters in the past with tikz
Wrote my thesis with it
My CV is made using it

>Worth it or autistic?
Depends.

>Any other tips for using LaTex to make math life easier?
WYSIWYG latex editors are great to get started on, it really does reduce mistakes as well.

Never learned Latex in school. Just finished a 580 page bachelor thesis in word. The formulas. The lists of figures. The horror.

Never again

>580 page bachelor thesis

you what

Posters, slides, notes.
Actually almost anything, I haven't touched office for years so I'm faster with latex anyway.

For you guys who wrote your thesis on LaTeX, did you define your own documentclass?

>Never learned Latex in school.
People learn lay's tech in school? Jesus. That's like taking a course on json. Learn things on your own that are useful to you, especially software.

>580 pages

that's longer than most doctoral theses

can't he just use that for his doctorate too?

Pretty sure that's plagiarism

I think they have a policy against theses made up to impress people on the chanz.

I've used papers I wrote freshman year and added to them and handed them in for other classes. that's plagarism?

Technically yes. But nobody cares for cases like that.

why is it plagarism? If your work was worthy of a doctoral thesis during your bachelor's then why can't it be used for your doctorate?

Self-plagiarism is a thing, especially if you're published - your work is no longer yours and belongs to the publisher.

Do you know how common it is for a doctoral thesis to be a compilation of a few published papers with some exposition intertwined?

you're getting into some tricky areas of ethics that not everyone agrees on, so hold on a second

to be more precise, saying it's plagiarism isn't absolutely correct. it's more like, it's something that many people consider unethical and it's close enough to plagiarism that people just use the same name for it.

as to why it's bad on a broader scale - say you have a scientist who publishes a paper, and then a couple years later decides he or she wants to pad out their CV and just publish the same paper again. that's bad for two broad reasons - it pollutes the literature and makes it harder to find truly unique data, and the previous paper probably consisted of effort from multiple collaborating scientists who probably didn't give consent for their work to be reproduced as new material.

there's also an abstract sense to plagiarism - it's not so much about causing harm to a specific person, but about it being dishonest to reproduce extant work. even if you were the sole author on a paper, you were the only person who contributed anything to it, and you republish it - it's not that you're harming anyone, it's that you're lying to everyone else by saying it's new work.

I think the point here is that a thesis might be a regurgitation of papers. It hardly creates the problem you are describing.

A paper cannot be regurgitated into another paper obviously.

Mfw my master thesis is probably gonna be around 80 pages

you realize this is significantly longer than SGA4.

And, no offense, but I find it pretty unlikely that an undergrad thesis has more /content/ than something like SGA4.

Length often arises from disorganization. Revisions are good user; they make it more likely that people will read and publish your work.

What are your top tips for anki cards, things you learned after making alot of them.
I only use anki cards for language learning currently but want to make some for my discrete math class

...

That's why you cite things. If you don't cite yourself when you take content from your old work then it's plagiarism.

There are places that will throw out resumes if you don't use LaTeX.

My math teacher wrote everything in latex, from homework assignments to the almost 200 pages of lecture notes he wrote during the semester (each page more beautiful than the other)
He was pretty autistic though, still the best teacher I've ever had

Are you using flash cards for math? Why? How?

how else are you suppose to remember [math]\pi [/math]

>580
control+c was a mistake

Negative B plus or minus the square root of the quantity B squared minus four times A times C, all over two A!

Damn straight! And all those other cryptic symbols like i and e!

Anybody here using sharelatex or overleaf?, i find them way to convenient instead of wasting time configuring shit to make latex run, also, collaborative projects

I use sharelatex for documents that I want to be able to access and edit on the go, however I enjoy having MiKTeX on my computer so I can work on longer projects. Sharelatex is great and I enjoy how flexible it can be.

devoted overleaf user here

its so easy i just never bothered looking at anything else

Anyone else feel a strange confidence boost when wearing latex? debility

I use it to write all my assignments and for notes and stuff. I've been using it for years and have become so comfortable with it that I find it easier to write stuff in LaTeX than in normal word processors.

I have my preamble hosted on github so whenever I want to write a new document I just git clone into a new directory. Since my gitignore is configured to ignore everything but the preamble then I can push changes up to github without worrying about accidentally pushing up anything I don't want. This way I can keep updating my preamble as freely as I want without it breaking my older documents in case I need to go back and recompile them.

I've been wanting to give XeTeX a try for a couple years now but I haven't built up the nerve to switch over. Maybe I will later this week.

Lately I've been combining LaTeX with Dexy for software documentation. Dexy lets you do all sorts of ridiculous things and it's not at all bound to LaTeX. Check it out!
vimeo.com/26417064

pic related

I use shareLaTeX. Love it.
Wish I could sync with Dropbox without paying though. Like having all my stuff in the cloud.

Eahh... even without math formulas

> *writing* diagrams in Tikz is superior to just drawing them
> using a real text editor instead of fighting the monstrostity that is Word
> having real source control
> not typesetting everything by hand

You have to go fully maniac to grasp the difference and bother to write all that shit whenever you want to write an integral

That's why you write macros.

After enough LaTeXing you become really anal with typesetting, presentation and spacing.

I can definitely see that already.

what is a good online resource for learning LaTeX?

google your problem, the answer is usually on stack overflow or that one wikibook site

>LaTeX
a shit

use XeLaTeX instead
>that proper font support
it's so good

stack overflow? you mean tex.se?

>> *writing* diagrams in Tikz is superior to just drawing them
also fun :)

I've only used LaTeX and this thread prompted me to do a tiny bit of research on modern flavors. A stackexchange answer from 2010 seems to indicate that XeTeX is easier at the time, but LuaTeX is probably a better ideal. Do you have an opinion on LuaTeX?

If you like
> writing diagrams in TikZ
you might also like:
> being pulled across gravel
> having spinters put under your fingernails
> urinary tract infection

Looks beautiful, perfect for equations but autistic as fuck.

In university: homework

Now: resumes

Oк, /sci, I am studying stat and R, got Ubuntu and Win10 machines. What LaTeX editor should I chose?

Vim or Emacs. Learn what sweave is.

We have to do our homework in LaTeX.

It's ... beautiful ...

Would you believe I actually use it for general correspondence? I've got my classes set up with letterhead and whatnot. Looks wicked nice for everything.

not really. i mostly prefer XeLaTeX for the fontspec package, and i haven't used LuaTeX

use a simple text editor

look into knitr

Mostly physics. The point of the cards is to remember important things for tests and such,not for conceptual learning. The cards are paired with my own notes and problem sets. All in all, it's a good system that is, admittedly, somewhat tedious but good for retention.

Keep the cards short. Make sure to label all constants, variables, etc. Eventually, you'll be able to identify everything in an equation without having to guess it. Need the magnetic field of a solenoid with n turns? Put it on a card along with a short derivation if possible. Having trouble remembering the solution to a certain integral and don't want to invoke residue theorem every time? Put it down on a card. The shorter and clearer you make your cards, the easier it will be to use Anki.

You could just learn conceptually and forgo the flashcards completely.