# Tag Archives: LaTeX

computing

## Computing Round-up

For today’s computing round-up, I have a few tips that came in handy.

• The LaTeX algorithmic and algorithm environments make nicely formatted pseudocode for describing algorithms. See the link above for details on usage
• To recover an auto-saved file from Emacs, use the command “M-x recover-file”. That was a life-saver today when my internet connection decided to crap out. One of the perils of doing all my work remotely through SSH, I suppose.
• Use Emacs Org mode to organize projects and to-do lists. I’m just starting to get my bearings, but I can already see how it is going to be phenomenally useful for larger projects. Some helpful links: official website; quick tutorial.
• Unfortunately Org mode has some conflicts with yasnippet (another Emacs tool that I am quite fond of). Here is a link to some documentation on how to fix it.
computing

## Make a Centralized Bibliographic Database with BibTeX!

Like most working mathematicians I know, I use LaTeX for all of my mathematical typesetting. Until recently, the vast majority of my writing was for assignments for classes and personal essays where I didn’t need to cite any sources. Fortunately there is a wonderful tool called BibTeX that easily manages citations for when inevitably I need to cite others’ work. I have started compiling a centralized database of all the papers and books that I cite in my own writings. All of the sources are in a single file (which I called sources.bib). In order for BibTeX to find sources.bib whenever I reference it, I placed the file in my local texmf tree:

.../texmf/bibtex/bib/sources.bib

Now any time I feel the need to cite, for example, Cover and Thomas’ Elements of Information Theory, all I need to do is put

\cite{CT06}

in my .tex file and BibTeX takes care of the rest.