Common LaTeX Mistakes by Newbies

· 2 min read

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.
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``Hello, World!''               % correct
"Hello, World!"                 % wrong
  1. Use tilde ~ to avoid a line break between words.
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(cf.~Vaswani et al.~\cite{vaswani_attention_2017}) % correct
(cf. Vaswani et al. \cite{vaswani_attention_2017}) % wrong
  1. 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.
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approx.\ 10 hours               % correct
approx. 10 hours                % wrong
  1. 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”.
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$f_{\text{fc}}$                 % correct
$f_{fc}$                        % wrong
  1. This is not LaTeX-specific, but a common mistake by students: Stick either to US English or UK English. Do not mix up.
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e.g., visualize                 % correct (US English)
e.g. visualise                  % correct (UK English)
e.g., visualise                 % wrong
e.g. visualize                  % wrong