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Jun 06

Useful LaTeX Packages for Your Thesis

Categories:

Academia, LaTeX for Your Thesis

by Sebastian

As many of my fellow students, I recently entered my last term at Imperial College. In contrast to the previous terms, there will not be any lectures, instead everyone will focus on some development or research, and on writing a report / Master’s thesis about it. Since this is my second thesis already, I got to know quite a lot of useful Latex packages and will share some tips in this the follow-up posts.

FiXme – Annotate your PDF with ToDos
When you are in writing mode, you usually just want to do that – write. Especially as opposed to working on administrative stuff like fetching and including the right BibTex data or looking for a specific quote, or reading into how to format that image. Still, you need to do those things later and don’t want to forget coming back to them. Instead of having a separate list of such ToDos, you can insert them directly into your LaTeX code at the right position and render it in the margin of the pdf, using the FiXme package:

%preamble
\usepackage[english, status=draft]{fixme}
\fxusetheme{color}

%in the document
\fxwarning{Fix this.} Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla nisi erat, ultricies quis faucibus vitae, interdum in urna. Nam id felis augue. Praesent mollis molestie convallis. In ac ante nisl. Nunc velit nisl, mollis nec \fxwarning*{Spelling?}{feugiat} nec, accumsan suscipit felis.

%List of all FiXme's at the end of the document (or whereever you like)
\listoffixmes

The margin comment looks like this:
Screenshot of the output of FiXme

This might also come in handy to point your reviewers to parts you are especially concerned about. For more information on useful options, e.g. different escalation levels (note, warning, error) or displaying FiXme’s as footnotes, see the FiXme manual

More tips to follow soon…

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1 comment

1 ping

  1. Janick

    11 June 2012 at 10:36 pm (UTC 1) Link to this comment

    Hi!
    Kannte das FiXme package noch nicht, benutze immer todonotes

    http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/todonotes/

    In allen papern. Man kann verschiedene Typen von Notes definieren, figure Platzhalter bauen und bekommt eine Liste von Todos ^^ Das einzige Problem ist, dass man es nicht direkt mit classicthesis benutzen kann, da muss man erst das interen Notessystem im Margin deaktivieren…

    vg Janick

  1. More LaTeX Tips for Your Thesis – Aliases and the xspace Package | Tech & everything

    11 June 2012 at 12:08 pm (UTC 1) Link to this comment

    [...] This is a follow-up post of this one [...]

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