LaTeX Recipes

I just spent the last weeks writing my dissertation on Collectivist Housing. Like everyone else, I did it in Word, which was a huge pain.

I spent at least a day and a half getting all my figures numbered correctly, making sure my bibliography was formatted correctly, all my citations were in the right format. Numbering things, making sure data is in the right format - sounds like something a computer would be good at.

Turns out there is software to do precisely this, and it's been around for 20 years: it's called LaTex.

Bold, Italic

The link between \textit{consumer choice} and political freedom is especially pronounced in the 1980s
The link between \textit{consumer choice} and political freedom is especially pronounced in the 1980s

Images

\begin{figure}[h]
    \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{./images/die-neue-wohnung-web.jpg}
    \caption{Video stills from 'The New Dwelling' ['Die Neue Wohnung'], a 1930 film showing the benefits of modernist housing}
    \label{fig:universe}
  \end{figure}

h is a label that controls where in the document the figure will show up. h will put it where it appears in the source document. ht puts it at the top of the page. There's loads of other options

Sections

\section{Section Title}
\subsection{Sub Section Title}

Citations

All your references go in a seperate file in this format:

@online{wilder,
    author = "Charly Wilder",
    year = "2016",
    institution = "The New York Times",
    note = "Accessed Nov. 14, 2017",
    title = "On the Bauhaus Trail in Germany",
    url = "https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/travel/bauhaus-germany-art-design.html"
}

This lets you keep a more information than will eventually end up in the bibliography, ie. the author's full name. In your actual text document, you reference entries in your bibliography file like this:

In a country still struggling to recover from the First World War, with violent revolutions going on in Europe and new technology changing every aspect of life, change seemed inevitable. \autocite{wilder}
Popular critics such as \textcite{wolfe} criticise modernist housing as being overly academic and fundamentally unfit for its purpose.

Again, there are many more options

LaTeX is going to pull in any information it needs to do a correct citation from the bibliography style. This means you can easily change your citation format if you need to - since we've seperated data from presentation, we can recompile the document in a different format at any point.

Front Matter

Since we've given LaTeX all sorts of information about our document, we can do neat things like this:

\begin{titlepage}
    \maketitle
\end{titlepage}
\tableofcontents
\listoffigures

Headers and Footers

 \pagestyle{fancy}
   \fancyhf{}
   \fancyhead[LE,RO]{\nouppercase{\leftmark}}
   \fancyfoot[LE,RO]{\thepage}