LaTeX Hacks

A list of useful hacks for working with LaTeX.

LaTeX

LaTeX snippets which might be useful;)

Subequations

The amsmath packages provides support for subequations - the equations in the example above will therefore get the numbers 1a and 1b.

  \begin{subequations}
    \begin{eqnarray}
      \label{eq:pyt}
        a^2 &=& b^2 + c^2 \\
      \label{eq:c}
        a &=& c\cdot cos(\phi)
     \end{eqnarray}
   \end{subequations}

Tables

• Huge Tables: use the supertabular environment or its successor the xtable environment.
• The longtable environment allows multi-page tables as well, but offers a much better control over line breaks.
• colorize cells/rows/columns: use the colortbl package.

\begin{tabular}{lcc}
Service  & Utility                      & Comment \\\hline
MyLab    & \cellcolor[gray]{0.5} 4000.1 & example1 \\
TestLab  & 43928.50                     & \cellcolor[gray]{0.8} example2 \\
\end{tabular}

• Handling Multirow and multicolumn spanning with latex tables.

Add Comments to PDFs

Install (and use ;) PDFComment. Add the following snippet to the beginning of your paper:

  % start_pdfcomments
  \usepackage{marginnote}
  \usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}
  \usepackage[colorlinks=true,linkcolor=black,citecolor=black,urlcolor=blue,plainpages=false,linktocpage]{hyperref}
  \usepackage{ifpdf}
  \usepackage{xkeyval}
  \usepackage{hycolor}
  \usepackage[color=Yellow,author={Albert Weichselbraun},final]{pdfcomment}
  % end_pdfcomments

Depending on your LaTeX installation you might be required to copy updated hycolor.sty, pdfcomment.sty, xcolor-patch.sty into your working directory.

BibTeX

This section contains various hacks related to BibTeX.

Bibliography styles

• Please take a look at Surajit Ray’s page on bibliography and citation styles.

Multiple Bibliographies

• Use the multibib package.

Finalizing Papers

The following snippets remove pdf-comments and change the link highlighting:

  \usepackage[colorlinks=true,linkcolor=black,citecolor=black,urlcolor=blue,plainpages=false,linktocpage]{hyperref}
  \usepackage[color=Yellow,author={Albert Weichselbraun},final]{pdfcomment}

Manipulating LaTeX, Postscript, PNG and PDF

Hacks for manipulating various LaTeX output formats like .pdf and postscript.

Extracting Formulas, Tables or other Parts from LaTeX documents

• Use the preview package to extract specific parts of the LaTeX document
• latex fname; dvipng fname will extract the table as an PNG-Image from the document below (provided that it has been saved as fname.tex)

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[active,floats]{preview}


\begin{document}

\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{table*}
\begin{tabular}{cc}
 $a, b, c$ & $f(a, b, c)$ \\\hline
  1, 1, 1  & 0.10 \\
  1, 1, 2  & 0.03 \\
  1, 2, 2  & 0.10 \\
  1, 2, 3  & 0.10 \\
  2, 2, 1  & 0.50 \\
  2, 2, 2  & 0.15 \\
  2, 3, 2  & 0.05 \\
  2, 3, 3  & 0.05 \\
  \ldots   &  \ldots \\
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
\end{document}

Embedding fonts in a PDF

pdflatex/pdftex do not embed all fonts in their default configuration. Some publishers (for instance IEEE when using IEEE PDF eXpress) require submitting papers with embedded fonts. The following command line creates a PDF conforming to these requirements:

 pdf2ps article.pdf - |ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress - article_embedded.pdf

Reducing the size of a PDF file

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

Other settings for -dPDFSETTINGS are /ebook and /printer, /prepress, /default.

Converting Postscript to png

 pstoimg -density 300 -antialias -aaliastext -multipage file.ps

Converting SVG to EPS

 inkscape tagcloud-mass-media.svg -E tagcloud-mass-media.eps --export-ignore-filters --export-ps-level=3

pdftk Tools

These tools support all kinds of manipulations of .pdf-documents like merging, splitting, rotating, filling of forms, applying of watermarks, repairing corrupted pdf-files (where possible), etc.

Example: join pdf-files:

 pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf cat output combined.pdf

PDFjam for handouts and more

PDFjam is used to manipulate PDF files and provides the following functions:

• pdfnup, put multiple PDF pages on one page,
• pdfjoin, combine PDF files,
• pdf90, rotate PDF files.

A full overview over PDFjam’s functionality is available here.

  pdfnup --nup 2x2 --frame false --noautoscale false --orient landscape --delta "0.2cm 0.3cm" --scale 0.95 slides.pdf

Converting transparent PNGs for use with LaTeX

Sometimes LaTeX does not handle the transparency of PNGs correctly. Use ImageMagick to convert the transparency of such images into a proper color (white) for printing:

  convert -background white -layers merge input.png output.png

Source: Lenni.Info

Create thumbnails from PDF files

The following command creates thumbnails of 72dpi (default) and a width of 100 pixels from the pages of a PDF document:

    convert file.pdf -resize 100 thumb.jpg

You end up with as many jpegs as the PDF document had pages.

Literature

• Ghostscript documentation
• ps2pdf documentation