ThesisWritingEffortExamplesandTricks

Introduction

TWEET = Thesis Writing Effort: Examples and Tricks

This is a collection of useful tricks, examples, and advise for all those who have to go through the thesis writing experience. The goal is that everybody can contribute and share their knowledge!

Depositing the thesis at the UAB

Look here for a nice cooking receipt prepared by the nice and gentle guys from the escola de postgrau.

Latex

• LaTeX wiki books: this is the online Bible for LaTeX
  It is definitely worth to cross-read it before starting, a lot of hints in here. So, like you think about the structure of a program before actually coding it, you should spend one or two days doing the same for your thesis. IT'S WORTH IT!!

• This is a somewhat extended math guide that includes further tricks and tipps.

• LaTeX Suite: a wonderful feature for VIM which accomodates a lot the LaTeX coding in VIM. For more see here.
  For example: typing figure+F5 directly gives you the complete figure structure. Similar for table and equation. You are going to write a lot, so it's worth it.
  For compiling: by typing \ll in VIM you can compile the code in VIM and it will jump directly to the file with the error/problems (and after its solution back). In order to make the compilation work you need a file myThesisTexFile.tex.latexmain, assuming that myThesisTexFile.tex is your main .tex file. Furthermore you need these two lines in your .vimrc

  let g:tex_flavor='latex'
  let g:Tex_UseMakefile=0  
  

  Latter is important! If you don't use that, latexsuite tries to use the Makefile in your directory which might yield to errors like make: * No rule to make target `dvi'.  Stop.

• Texmaker: if you want something more GUI-ish, this might be a good choive, especially when you still think, that nano, nedit, kpad are good editors. If you think emacs is, have look here.

• Spell check in VIM: :setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

• Packages you might want to use:
  • rotating: do rotate figures (nice feature is sidewaystable; to make it work properly con twoside I had to use \usepackage[figuresleft]{rotating}
    
  • acronym: nice Acronyms, can be listed in table at end
    
  • units: nice 7 TeV as $\unit[7]{TeV}$
    
  • graphicx: to include figures easily
    
  • subfig: for subfigures with subfloat
    
  • fancyhdr: der Name ist Programm
    
  • hyperref: working URLs
    
  • breakurl: break URLs at the end of the line
    
  • verbatim: for verbatim stuff
    
  • amssymb: for fancy equations
    
  • amsmath: for fancy equations
    
  • tabularx: table on whole page, and rotated
    
  • sparticles: for feynman graphs (sparticles.sty)
    
  • feynmf: for feynman graphs (feynmf.sty: you may want to save this file in your LaTeX directory, e.g. /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/feynmf/feynmf.sty)
    
  • feynmp: should in principle come with feynmf installation. Might be better because it uses METAFONT, so you don't have problems when printing the pdf. In addition you need to =texlive-metopost package (see Feynman Graphs paragaph below)
  • srcltx: in .dvi file Ctrl+click + .bashrc: EDITOR=vim
  • booktabs: profissional tables (btw, never use vertical bars, that doesn't look professional, use toprule,bottomrule,midrule)

• ATLAS physics style file with a lot of short cuts like \ttbar and so on. Really helpful and official styling
  You can have also a look at the official ATLAS Style guide

References

• change the type for ATLAS notes by hand from Document to Journal Paper
• correct arXiv names by hand
• You might want to save the journal link and not the arXiv link, although you can put latter as Extra to each item
• Prevent Name cutting: The ATLAS Collaboration => {The ATLAS Collaboration}

A bunch of bibTeX style files are provided here by arXiv.org
I hacked one, such that you only have one author named and the others as "et.al." (usefull for collaboration papers), and the titel is in italic and quotes (change format.btitle to format.title in case you don't want italic):
h-physrev-vv.bst: Hacked h-physrev bibtex style

Others

• \cleardoublepage : In a two-sided printing style, it makes the next page a right-hand (odd-numbered) page, producing a blank page if necessary.
  

How to get a figure/table/formula from a paper in arXive.org:
go to Download > Other Formats > Source > Download source . You might have there the complete tex file and figures! (Thanx Verena )
Another way is to just zoom full screen to the figure and make a snap shot. Then you can convert the .png from the snap shot to a .eps using
a2ping figure.png figure.eps

Feynman Graphs
There are some websites providing a bunch of feynman graphs, e.g. this D0 page.
Simple easy-to-use program to draw feyman graphs: http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net/
However, you might want to lose some time and do them on your own, nicely implemented in your LaTeX code. For this purpose you can use FeynMF or FeynMP. Latter uses Metafont (see usepackage section above). Just include the packages mentioned above and then include feynman graphs like this in you .tex file:

\begin{figure}[!htb]
  \begin{center}
  \begin{tabular}{cccccccccccccccc}
  \subfloat[]{
    \begin{fmffile}{virtualTop1}
      \fmfframe(1,7)(1,7){
       \begin{fmfgraph*}(110,62)
        \fmfleft{i1}
        \fmfright{o1}
        \fmf{boson,tension=2}{i1,v1}
        \fmf{fermion,left=0.8,label=$t$}{v1,v2}
        \fmf{fermion,left=0.8,label=$\bar{b}$}{v2,v1}
        \fmf{boson,tension=2}{v2,o1}
        \fmflabel{$W$}{i1}
        \fmflabel{$W$}{o1}
       \end{fmfgraph*}
      }
    \end{fmffile}}
   \end{tabular}
   \end{center}
   \caption{The caption.}
   \label{fig:feynGraph1}
 \end{figure}

When implementing Feynman diagrams it might be useful to first try them in a test.tex file, to shorten the compilation time. Also it might be needed to delete all file generated during the compilation process to update the feynman diagram files. Restarting xdvi also works as a solution

Useful Scripts

*prepBib.sh

Script to prepare the bib file

*Makefile

Makefile to compile your LaTeX code

*greper.py.txt

Search sub-directories for the argument (../greper.py ARG) and open vim. Good to change some string in the complete thesis, e.g. BG to background (TWiki added .txt, you might want to delete this)

-- VolkerVorwerk - 02-Jun-2011
-- VolkerVorwerk - 15-Apr-2011
-- EstelPerez - 23-Mar-2011