My First L A TEX Report Structure, Formatting, Useful Packages and Commands

Transcription

1 My First L A TEX Report Structure, Formatting, Useful Packages and Commands My Name 15. September

2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Document Structure A short subtitle for the table of contents Formatting Text 4 4 L A TEX and German 5 5 Useful Packages and Commands 6 6 Troubleshooting 7 7 Conclusion 7 Bibliography 7 2

3 1 Introduction This is your very first L A TEX report. While you will typically be starting from a template provided by your advisor or a journal, this document will allow you to familiarize with basic L A TEX syntax and formatting, and introduce some very helpful packages and commands. Start off by reading through this document and exploring its features. Everything you need to know to reproduce this document is explained over the next pages. You will find links to install packages and documentation on our website: 2 Document Structure L A TEXdocuments are built up as follows: document header: this is where you define the document type (report, thesis, book) and page layout (A4, single column, etc.) and include packages to add functionality. This document was created using the header \documentclass[11pt, twoside, a4paper]{article}. document body: this is where you put the introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusions, acknowledgements, etc. bibliography and appendices: you ll learn more about this later in the tutorial, but let s already cite a great reference for L A TEX users, the Not so short introduction to L A TEX 2ε [1]. The document body is structured into sections (\section{section Title}) and subsections (\subsection{subsection Title}), which will be listed in the table of contents. Start off by adding all the sections and subsections to the document, then fill in the contents. To generate a table of contents, simply include the \tableofcontents command after the title page in the document body. When you typeset your main document, a file with the extension.toc will be created (you can have a look at it with a text editor). You will need to compile a second time to make the table of contents appear in your document. You will notice that the Bibliography is not listed in the table of contents. To add it, or any other entry you wish, use the command \addcontentsline{toc}{section}{my bibliography} You will often refer to parts of your report or thesis. To allow for references, you will need to place labels. This works for sections, subsections, equations, figures, tables etc., and is done using the \label{labelname} command directly after the corresponding title. We suggest you use easy to distinguis labels, such as f:figurelabel for figures, t:tabellabel for tables, 3

4 and s:sectionlabel or ss:subsectionlabel for sections and subsections. So now we can include a reference to the section on Document Structure, by using \ref{s:structure}, and refer the reader to Section 2. Include the package showkeys to display all labels and make referencing easier, and comment it out using % when you re done. Note that you will need to compile twice as the.aux file needs to be updated first. 2.1 A long and especially boring subtitle, shown in the text, but way too long to be listed in the table of contents If the title of your section, figure, table etc. is very long, you may want to include a shorter title for the table of contents. This is achieved using the command: \section[short title for TOC]{long title}\label{s:sectionlabel} 3 Formatting Text Here a list of the most commonly used commands for text formatting and special characters: use \verb+command+ (most characters will do, except for letters, * or space; to display this command you will of course need to use character different from +) or \begin{verbatim} command \end{verbatim} to print commands. \verb will allow you to display text within a paragraph, whereas the verbatim environment will create a separate section. I have not copied this from the last course FS use \textit{italic text} for italic text. use \textbf{bold text} for bold text. use $value~unit$ to write, e.g. 20 Hz. The tilde will adjust the spacing and keep the value and unit together. write scalars s in italic, column vectors v in bold, their transpose line vectors as v T ($\mathbf{v}^t$), and matrices M capital bold. Note that there are many different conventions, so check with your supervisor or the journal in which you plan to publish your work. use $20^\circ$ for 20, $\sim$ for, \ldots for..., $\alpha$ for α, and refer to the Not so short introduction to L A TEX [1] or search Google for an endless number of further symbols and commands. To cite the report of T. Oetiker, use \cite{oet08}, where Oet08 is the citation key we defined for this reference in the bibliography. use \newpage to continue on a new page 4

5 use \\ or \newline to insert a line break. If you receive a compilation error, try \vspace{1cm}. 4 L A TEX and German If you are interested in the German document of A not so short introduction to L A TEX, you can find a version updated for L A TEX 2ε by Jörg Knappen at CTAN://info/lshort/german. Wenn Sie ein Dokument auf Deutsch verfassen empfiehlt es sich, die folgenden Packages im Vorspann aufzurufen: \usepackage[ngerman]{babel} \usepackage[t1]{fontenc} \usepackage[encoding]{inputenc} Umlaute können dann ganz normal eingegeben werden (z. Bsp. ö anstatt \ o). Die Variable encoding ist je nach Systemumgebung verschieden (ansinew für Windows, applemac für Mac OS, und latin1 oder utf8x 1 je nach Unix Distribution. Sie werden bemerken, dass dieses Package auch dazu führt, dass sich der Table of Contents nun Inhaltsverzeichnis nennt. Mit dem Befehl \renewcommand{\contentsname}{my table of contents title} können Sie diesen beliebig verändern. Dasselbe geht auch für die List of Figures, mit dem Befehl \renewcommand\listfigurename{my list of figures title} sowie für die Bibliographie mit \renewcommand\bibname{my bibliography} in der book oder report Umgebung, bzw. \renewcommand\refname{my bibliography} in der article Umgebung. 1 Benötigt das ucs package. 5

6 1 5 Useful Packages and Commands 2 Packages can be included to extend the functionality of your L A TEX environment. Here a list of some extremely helpful ones, which can be included with the command \usepackage{packagename}. 3 babel a multilingual package. Makes your life easier when writing in German or French. Refer to section 4 for use. 4 5 hyperref adds functionality for hypertext links to references, table of contents, URLs, bibliography citations, etc. 6 7 lineno displays line numbers. This is especially helpful when you get feedback from your advisors and colleagues. Place \pagewiselinenumbers at the point in the document body from where you want to display line numbers. 8 lscape allows you to switch to landscape layout anywhere in the text. Switch back and forth using the commands \begin{landscape} and \end{landscape}. 9 pdftex color text with the \usepackage[pdftex]{color} package and the \textcolor{color}{text} command. 10 showkeys display section, figure and table labels. 11 url use this when referring to URLs. Use as \url{ 12 There are also many useful commands, which are invoked using \command. 13 onecolumn, twocolumn switch between one column and two column layout anywhere in the text. 14 footnote Footnotes are called with the command. Use as \footnote{a footnote} 2. marginpar allows you to add a comment in the margin. Use as \marginpar{this note will appear in the margin.} 15 2 A footnote This note will appear 16 in the margin. 6

7 Troubleshooting if the layout is not as expected, recompile if you receive compilation errors, make sure you correctly closed all brackets, trash.aux files, and recompile twice if you still receive compilation errors, use the goto error button and read the error message make sure you placed packages and commands in the right part of the file (header, body); note that some packages may be incompatible with others search for question marks (?) in the PDF file to resolve incorrect references 7 Conclusion Now add the hyperref package using \usepackage{hyperref}, and see how it simplifies the navigation in your report. It s not all that difficult, is it?! And it will be even easier and more powerful if you start with a template, e.g. our lab template for Bachelor/Master theses which you will receive and use tomorrow, or, e.g., the IEEE conference/journal template [2] which you will surely use someday should you publish your work. Bibliography [1] Oetiker, T., Partl, H., Hyna, I., and Schlegl, E., The Not So Short Introduction to L A TEX 2ε, Version 4.26, September 25, [2] authors/authors_journals.html, IEEE, visited Sept. 20,