Writing LaTeX with other people¶

Note

This is taken from The Rules for happily collaborating on a LaTeX document©.

The 10 rules you should follow if you're writing a LaTeX documents with other people.

1. You shall use only one sentence per line¶

And use one empty line to start a new paragraph. It'll then be easier to track changes in Git, since these are line-based.

I like to create buffers in ArcGIS.
But it is not always possible as it often crashes.

Also, ...

2. You shall use natbib for citations¶

and the commands \citet{} (cite in the text as a noun) \citep{} (cite between parentheses).

\usepackage[round]{natbib}
...
\citet{Smith00} succeeded in creating a buffer.
However, it has been shown that it is not an easy task~\citep{Brown90}.

3. You shall prevent breaking lines with "~" when referencing and citing¶

In Section~\ref{sec:intro}, we can observe that the buffer was a success~\citep{Smith99}.

4. You shall use one `-` for an hyphen, two `--` for a range between numbers, and three `---` for a punctuation in a sentence¶

I like---unlike my father---to build multi-dimensional models, 
especially those made in 1990--1995.

5. You shall give meaningful labels¶

A figure's label should start with fig: and a section's label with sec:

\section{Introduction}  
\label{sec:intro}

In recent years, buffers have been rather complex to implement because ...

6. You shall put a short space after e.g. and i.e. with the use of a backslash¶

The following two commands shall thus be used:

\newcommand{\ie}{i.e.}
\newcommand{\eg}{e.g.}
...
Buffers can be generated on different geometries, \eg\ points, polylines and polygons.

7. You shall put all figures/graphs in a single subfolder (`figs/`)¶

And you shall put the source file (eg IPE, OmniGraffle, Illustrator, etc.) there as well for future use.

You can then use this to specify the relative path for all figures (it refers to the figure ./figs/potato.pdf):

\graphicspath{{figs/}}

\includegraphics[width=0.95\linewidth]{potato.pdf}

8. In your BibTeX file, you shall use curly brackets for words/letters you want to have capitalised in the title¶

The other fields are not affected by this. LaTeX does this to uniformise the capitalisation in all citations.

@article{Smith00,
  Author = {Smith, John},
  Journal = {The GIS Journal},
  Title = {The {3D} {CityGML} building was constructed with the {Delaunay} triangulation},
  Year = {2001},
  ...
}

9. You shall not add any commands to change the format until the the paper is finished¶

\vspace and \newpage are thus forbidden.

10. You shall declare all sizes relative to `\linewidth`.¶

So that the paper can be switched to a 2-column one without (too much) pain.

\includegraphics[width=0.95\linewidth]{potato.pdf}