Tips for text

## Tips for text

Here are some fine points of TeXnical typing that novices often overlook.

• Do not use the " key to make quotation marks in LaTeX. When typesetting in American English, make smart quotes'' by doubling the  key for opening quotes and doubling the ' key for closing quotes. (Of course, if you are typing in some language other than English, quotation marks may have a different style. The LaTeX Companion documents LaTeX's babel package that supports multiple languages.)

• LaTeX normally "stretches" spaces after periods, because it expects periods to end sentences. Therefore, when a period follows an abbreviation (but is not the end of a sentence), you need to alert LaTeX not to stretch the following space. LaTeX interprets a backslash followed by a space as an unstretchable space, and a tilde ~ as an unbreakable space. For example, you could type "Washington Univ.\ is in St.~Louis." (Do not go overboard with this. It is not good style to use a lot of abbrevs.)

• The proper way to make three dots ... for ellipsis is to use the LaTeX control sequence \ldots. You will need to type \ldots\  if you want a space following the dots.

• The ampersand & is a special character, so to get "Texas A&M University" you will need to type Texas A\&M University.

• Dashes come in three sizes. For an intra-word hyphen, you type, for example, "semi-algebraic set". For a punctuation dash, you should type three - characters: this---for example---is a dash. You use a short dash with two - characters for page ranges in bibliographies. For an example showing the importance of distinguishing between a hyphen and a dash, see the exercise on truth in advertising. In American English, one ordinarily leaves no space around a dash; other languages have different styles.

• For consistency of style in LaTeX, remember to put short formulas--even formulas consisting of a single letter--inside mathematics delimiters. Type "if $$n$$ is an integer", not "if n is an integer".

     \documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Do you see that x=a and $$x=a$$ are different?
\end{document}


How do I get rid of page numbers?

Usually you can prevent LaTeX from printing page numbers at the bottom of the page by putting the command \pagestyle{empty} in the preamble of your LaTeX source file. (You might want to do this for a one-page document, for example.) However, \maketitle overrides the global pagestyle declaration, so you may have to use \thispagestyle{empty} to disable the page number on a title page.

How can I indent the first line after a section heading?

The default LaTeX style does not indent the first line of the first paragraph following a section heading. You can disable this feature by putting the declaration \usepackage{indentfirst} in the preamble of your source file (between the \documentclass line and the \begin{document}` line).