Some useful research tools

In course of the research, one encounters several similar-sounding problems which appear to be simple enough in nature that their solutions need not be developed from ab initio but complicated enough that there might be more than a bunch of good, bad, and ugly solutions to them. Such issues could include saving figures in programmable-cum-editable-vector form (to be more ambitious, one could throw in OS dependencies in the mix too), or creating keyboard shortcuts for quick Google scholar search. Every researcher ends up employing their own strategy (pure or mixed) to a slew of such problems. In this section, I will provide some of these tools and t'wicks with the hope of avoiding reinventing the wheel. The relevant topic for each pointer is marked in bold, 

Here is a minimal working example (in MATLAB) with a neat plot showcasing an improvement in run-time of two orders of magnitude. Pleading innocent for the suspected plagiarism in the file name.

Mathworks documentation may be a good place to start. Loren has also written about this and more ideas to speed up the program in great depth with good examples. 

{

"key": "ctrl+shift+f",

"command": "workbench.action.toggleEditorWidths"

      }

Sub changeFont_psb()
Dim oShape As Shape
Set oShape = ActiveWindow.Selection.ShapeRange(1)
With oShape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font
    .Name = "Times New Roman"
End With
End Sub

Home -> Options -> Quick Access Toolbar -> Your Macro Name -> Add -> Move to the top -> Alt + 1

Note: For individual sheets with a large number of entries, splitting the view is perhaps more suitable than the new window. View -> Split. Select a row/column to split before along rows/columns or a cell to split along both. Double-click on the split demarcations to remove them.

    { s nameptr "{ff~}{vv~}{ll}{, jj}" format.name$ 't := % first name first

to

    { s nameptr "{vv~}{ll}{, f.}{, jj}" format.name$ 't := % last name first

\bibliographystyle{plainnat-psb}

\bibliography{bibliography.bib}

% !TeX TXS-program:compile = txs:///pdflatex/[--shell-escape]

This may be useful in a variety of situations. I needed it for a journal that had Figure captions starting with "FIGURE n". The in-text references should be "Figure n". 


(1/2) The easier solution is to edit the field code of the cross-referencing of the captions directly. Solution based on this. The steps follow:

{ REF _Ref218925266 \h }

to

{ REF _Ref218925266 \# 0 \h }

This solution fails with some pdf converters and rendered the pdf with "Figure FIGURE n".


(2/2) The robust solution is to create a sequence and use bookmarks for cross-referencing. Solution based on this. The steps are as follows:

exportName = sprintf('myFig');

extensions = {'fig', 'epsc', 'png', 'jpeg', 'emf'};

for k = 1:length(extensions)

saveas(gcf, exportName, extensions{k})

end

\documentclass{article}% or something else

\usepackage{pdfpages}

\begin{document}

\includepdf[pages=...]{paper1}

\includepdf[pages=...]{paper2}

\end{document}

pdftk ExampleFile.pdf burst output Individual_File_P%d.pdf