LaTex Tips

In the course of using LaTex for various assignements and papers, I have stumbled upon a few problems that required aditional packages.

Parse Tree

Allows easy and straight forward construction of trees with low branching factors (I've only used it for 3 or less).
Instructions and Source

Long Table

Allows you to create tables that:
  1. Occupy the end of one page and the start of the next when shorter than one page,
  2. Span multiple pages when longer that one page.
The first item might not seem like a big deal, but this can be a real space saver, and makes longtables worthwhile even if you don't actually have really long tables.
Instructions and Source

Installation

Remember to:
  1. Place files ....
  2. Run texhash

Figures

Fellow graduate student Gedare Bloom ( website ) provided me with some usefull advice for inserting figures into a LaTex document. This is derived from his emails to me.

To the preamble add:

\usepackage{graphicx}

Declare extension and subdirectory (can omit path, will just use the current directory):

\graphicspath{{../eps/}}
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.eps}

To insert a figure:

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{filename}
\end{figure}

Additional commands and options:

\begin{figure*}[htb]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=.8\textwidth]{filename.jpg}
\caption{A caption for the picture.}
\label{fig:myfirstfigure}
\end{figure*}

"figure*" specifies that the figure should span the entire page, regardless of columns. "[htb]" gives an approximate postion (here, top, or bottom).

"\label" lets you refer to the figure from elsewhere in your document. For this use "\ref":

\ref{fig:myfirstfigure}