Are you using these time-saving features of LaTeX?

We will cover here some good practice when writing your manuscripts with $\LaTeX$ . To make sure the persons who review your manuscript before submission (more details) pay attention to the content of your article instead of the little problems, it is worth following these tips.

Useful packages

To make sure your references to figures, tables and equations are always the same, use the package cleveref.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{cleveref}

%... in the document

\Cref{yourLabel}

Use package glossaries to define acronyms properly. This helps getting the acronyms defined once and for all and not taking care of defining them the first time you use them.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[nonumberlist,acronyms]{glossaries} 

\begin{document}
\input{acronym} %separate file defining the acronyms

%when using an acronym (not only the first time)
\gls{acronymName}
%having a macro for this piece of code is useful

In the separate file, the acronyms are defined like this:

%\newacronym{acronymName}{acronym}{acronym definition}
\newacronym{TDC}{TDC}{Top Dead Center}

Using units properly is like displaying the right number of significant digit, it is obvious but when it is wrong, it gives a really bad impression. To help you with this, you can rely on the siunitx package.
Writing equations correctly is much easier with the commath package. Check how to write $\frac{\partial x}{\partial t}$ as simply as \pd{x}{t} and $\frac{\mathrm{d}^2 f}{\mathrm{d}x^2}$ as \od[2]{f}{x}.

Useful packages

3 Replies to “Are you using these time-saving features of LaTeX?”