5 essential tips and tricks to writing effective research papers using LaTeX

5 min readNov 10, 2020

LaTeX is the defacto standard in the engineering and science communities when it comes to writing a thesis, report, or research paper, etc. LaTeX provides various features that make it a better candidate as compared to other document-processing tools such as MS Word or LibreOffice. Some of its key features are

The document looks nice — Apart from all the other advantages of LaTeX, in my opinion, the final document generated by LaTeX looks really nice, properly organized, and better formatted as compared to other document-processing tools.
No weird accidental formatting problems — In MS Word, you change the placement of one figure slightly, and the layout entire document goes chaotic. LaTeX preserves the layout and formatting of your document.
Great citation method — LaTeX has an upper-hand went it comes to handling references and citations. Like other document-processing tools, you don’t have to worry about maintaining your reference. LaTeX does it for you through BibTex.
It’s free — LaTeX is open-source and is free to use. You don’t have to worry about that at some point it will start asking you to pay to continue using it.

In this article, we will go through 5 tips and tricks that can help you create even better LaTeX documents.

1. [Tool] MathPix — Copy math equations from images

Copying complex proofs from your hand-written notes to LaTeX can be really difficult and time-consuming. MathPixs can greatly assist you in this issue. MathPixs generates source code for LaTeX equations from camera images. For simpler equations, the tool works great. For more complex formatting, the source code requires a little bit of tweaking. Nevertheless, it gives you a great starting point. This can come in handy copying your mathematical derivations from your hand-written notes or copy basic equations from other papers into your LaTeX document.

The tool is free and can be downloaded from here. The free version gives access to 50 snippets a month.

Overleaf is a collaborative cloud-based LaTeX editor used for writing, editing, and publishing scientific documents. You don’t have to worry about installing MiKTeX or required packages. It even provides a great set of templates for various journals/publications. One of the best parts of overleaf is the author-collaboration feature. Multiple users can edit the same LaTeX document at the same time. This makes it easier for co-authors to work on a unified draft of the research paper. Overleaf also maintains a revision history of the document and provides a chat feature that really comes in handy when collaborating on a document. I have tried various LaTeX editors in the past 4 years and my opinion Overleaf is one of the best ones.

Website: www.overleaf.com

3. [Tip] Cmr10 — Consistent font across the document

Cmr10 Font — Image Source: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/194304/font-in-harvmac-title

Figures are an important part of your research paper. Although a lot of figures can be made using the LaTeX’s tikz package, but requires a lot of effort/time and might not result in the desired figure. Hence most of the researchers use external figure-making tools such as MS Powerpoint, MS Visio, etc. The results graphs usually are made either on MS Excel, MATLAB, or Python’s matplotlib.

When these figures are imported into LaTeX as graphics, there is an inconsistency between LaTeX’s default font and the font that was used in the figure.

The figure font y-axis labels and legends are different from the LaTeX edited captions. — Image Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.08241.pdf

This inconsistency can be taken care of by downloading the right font. You can download the font, cmr10, which is really similar to the one that LaTeX uses, and install it in your Operating system (Windows, Linux, macOS). When making figures, using cmr10 font will result in consistency between the figures and the LaTeX text body.

5 essential tips and tricks to writing effective research papers using LaTeX

1. [Tool] MathPix — Copy math equations from images

3. [Tip] Cmr10 — Consistent font across the document

Written by Xavierkuddus