1.8 Installing LaTeX

TeX is a typsetting system developed by Donald Knuth. I have started to write automated LaTeX reporting into Pypospack because the amount of data makes it difficult to do it all by hand. As a result, it is necessary to install LaTeX on your computer to do the automated reporting. I have not tested if automated reporting works on Windows.

Installation of LaTeX

In all cases, I suggest using the TeX Live from the TeX Users Group, which has the latest distribution. The package installers of LaTeX have a tendency to be dated and may not work with the latest CPAN repositories.

• Installation of LaTeX on OSX here. Although this is a command line tool, it kind of takes a while to install, I would budget about an hour or so for it to install.
• Installation of LaTeX on Windows.

Setting up Atom for LaTeX

Install the following packages:

apm install language-latex

apm install latex

apm install autocomplete-latex

apm install latex-wordcount

apm install hyperclick latex-hyperclick

References:

Setting up Atom for LaTeX

Installation of latexmk

The compilation of a LaTeX document is somewhat involved, and I kind of don't understand it. This should already be installed if you are using a MaxTex (for Apple OSX) or MikTex (for WindowsOS) distributions.

latexmk -pv -pdf latex_filename_wo_extension

Basic Latex Document Layout

I generally do a document like this. I haven't figured out a chemistry package I like

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amsmath} % math

\usepackage{amssymb} % more math

\usepackage{amsthm} % if you need a theorem environment

\usepackage{amsfonts} % even more math

\usepackage{bm} % for bold face fonts

\usepackage{miller} % for miller notation, I am a materials scientist!

\usepackage{braket} % for Dirac braket notation

\usepackage{graphicx}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\title{My first document}

\date{\today}

\author{John Doe}

\begin{document}

  \maketitle

%% TYPE YOUR LATEX HERE

  Hello World!

%% uncomment this section if you need bibliography

%%\bibliography{bib_filename_wo_extensions}

%%\bibliographystyle{acm}

\end{document}

Latex Snippets

Inserting a figure

\begin{figure}

    \includegraphics{filename_wo_extensions}

    \centering

    \caption{put your caption here}

\end{figure}

Bibtex Tricks

Sometimes journals require a an abbreviated journal name instead of the long journal name. If you have a .bib file that contains entries without a field named fjournal and other entries that contain both an fjournal and a journal field. You would like to a bibliography exactly as in style "plain" but with the contents of field journal replaced by the field fjournal whenever such a field exists. Is this possible? You can let Biber pre-process your .bib file.

Create a file called biber.conf with the following content

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<config>

  <sourcemap>

    <maps datatype="bibtex" level="user">

      <map map_overwrite="1">

        <map_step map_field_source="fjournal"/>

        <map_step map_field_set="journal" map_origfieldval="1"/>

      </map>

    </maps>

  </sourcemap>

</config>

Then run Biber in its tool mode on your .bib file, if it is called fjourn.bib you would run

biber --tool fjourn.bib

you get a new file fjourn_bibertool.bib where the fjournal field is copied to the journal field. You can then use fjourn_bibertool.bib in your document.