Common LaTeX Mistakes by Newbies

· 1 min read
LaTeX writing tips

Writing in LaTeX needs some experience as there are a few things not obvious to newbies. In this post, I list some common mistakes that the newbies often make.

1. Use two back quotes `` and two apostrophes '' to start and end quoting

Standard quotation marks " won’t be rendered correctly.

``Hello, World!''               % correct
"Hello, World!"                 % wrong

2. Use tilde ~ to avoid a line break between words

(cf.~Vaswani et al.~\cite{vaswani_attention_2017}) % correct
(cf. Vaswani et al. \cite{vaswani_attention_2017}) % wrong

3. Write .\ if the dot is not used as a period

Omitting the backslash leads to a larger space between the period and the next word.

approx.\ 10 hours               % correct
approx. 10 hours                % wrong

4. In the math environment, use the \text{} command for words that are not variables or indices

For example, if “fc” stands for a fully-connected layer in a neural network, write $f_{\text{fc}}$. Just writing $f_{fc}$ results in ugly rendering of “fc”.

$f_{\text{fc}}$                 % correct
$f_{fc}$                        % wrong

5. Stick to either US English or UK English — do not mix them up

This is not LaTeX-specific, but a common mistake by students.

e.g., visualize                 % correct (US English)
e.g. visualise                  % correct (UK English)
e.g., visualise                 % wrong
e.g. visualize                  % wrong