Tips & Tricks with LaTeX

In my previous blog post, I talked about how LaTeX is a fantastic tool and I concluded with some generators that could be interesting. I had to write some documents with LaTeX and I wanted to improve my work flow. I will share with you some tips & tricks I discovered.

Title page

Create a title page with LaTeX could scare you but I realized that with the awesome LaTeX documentation, it was really easy to customize the title page. Just check this wiki page and it should explain everything to you.

White spaces!

I don't like reading documents with a lot of text and no spaces. By default, paragraphs in LaTeX don't have margins, so I've got into the habit of adding \\ after every paragraph to add a new line. I didn't know but this practice was the reason of all my LaTeX warning, complaining about Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 11--51. I knew it wasn't the best solution but I didn't take the time to look deeper.

After just a few searches, I found the solution. And it's really straight forward, just add in your main file:

\setlength{\parskip}{\baselineskip}

The main drawback of this solution is that the table of content is using paragraph to print the titles. I ended up with big skip after every line in my table of content. For my use case it was really cool and the result is in fact nicer (because I don't have a lot of chapters and I think it's clearer) but for the majority, it's gonna be awful. I'm sorry I don't have a solution right now but as soon as I need to write another document, I will check a solution for this problem.

Automatic compilation work flow

• Save file
• Switch desktop to Okular
• Alt-Tab to switch to Konsole
• Up arrow to get the make
• Enter to execute the command
• Alt-Tab to go back to Okular
• Look the result

This was my previous work flow. Not optimized at all, so I looked for some file watcher tool and I found the most basic one: inotify-tools. With Arch Linux it's just:

pacman -S inotify-tools

And then I wrote a simple bash script I named watch.sh watching recursively for changes in my current folder and running the make command each time a file was saved.

while true; do
  change=$(inotifywait -re close_write,moved_to,create .)
  make && make clean
done

And here is my new work flow:

• Save file
• Switch desktop to Okular
• Look the result

Much better!

GitLab CI

I'm a big fan of GitLab, did you know that you can have as many private repositories as you want in GitLab.com?

GitLab is an open-source alternative to Github, the interface and the features are awesome! GitLab comes with a Continuous Integration tool called GitLab CI. As with Travis, you can write a .gitlab-ci.yml and run the tests of your project after each git push. What's the point for LaTeX documents? I don't have tests. But I have an artifact. An artifact is a compiled file you want to access after your build (a binary to run your software, a documentation to deploy or a PDF document for example). Here is my .gitlab-ci.yml file:

---

pdflatex:
  script: make
  artifacts:

After your first build, you should see a new button in the GitLab UI.

And browse all the files.

Of course, to use GitLab CI you need to deploy a GitLab CI runner with LaTeX installed. But it's really with Ansible :-)

---

- name: be sure Tex Live is present
  apt: name=texlive-full state=latest

A few more tips

Use \graphicspath{{images/}} to set the root folder of all your graphics.

If you use a french keyboard like me and manually write all you non-breakable spaces, insert this \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{00A0}{~}

If you want a font size bigger than 12pt, \usepackage{extsizes} and define your document as a \documentclass[14pt,a4paper]{extreport}.

And if you want two words to always be one (no hyphenation breaks), define \hyphenation{Quantic Telecom}.