My favorite LaTeX Tricks to save time

Get started with LaTeX using Overleaf: ► www.overleaf.com/?.... My thanks to Overleaf for sponsoring today's video.
Check out the previous videos in my LaTeX playlist: ► • LaTeX Tutorials
0:00 Getting Started
0:28 New Commands
1:58 Conditional Formatting
4:23 Write your own package
5:37 Multiple Files
8:18 Tracking Changes
9:25 Be Semantic
12:31 Cleveref
15:34 Template Files
16:18 www.overleaf.com
Today is all about my top tricks and tips to write efficiently in LaTeX. This video isn't going to change how your math documents look, but they will make it was easier to write them. We will see how to use
ewcommand to replace long common expressions with short ones, see how to use if statements to conditionally format documents, put the preamble into an included style sheet, break your big project into multiple chapters, using Overleaf features like history and tracking changes, being semantic so you focus on meaning as opposed to formatting, and finally using template files.
For more information on writing your own package as I briefly did in the video moving the preamble into its own package, check out a more detailed guide here: www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/...
Check out my MATH MERCH line in collaboration with Beautiful Equations
►beautifulequations.net/pages/...
COURSE PLAYLISTS:
►DISCRETE MATH: • Discrete Math (Full Co...
►LINEAR ALGEBRA: • Linear Algebra (Full C...
►CALCULUS I: • Calculus I (Limits, De...
► CALCULUS II: • Calculus II (Integrati...
►MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS (Calc III): • Calculus III: Multivar...
►VECTOR CALCULUS (Calc IV) • Calculus IV: Vector Ca...
►DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS: • Ordinary Differential ...
►LAPLACE TRANSFORM: • Laplace Transforms and...
►GAME THEORY: • Game Theory
OTHER PLAYLISTS:
► Learning Math Series
• 5 Tips To Make Math Pr...
►Cool Math Series:
• Cool Math Series
BECOME A MEMBER:
►Join: / @drtrefor
MATH BOOKS I LOVE (affilliate link):
► www.amazon.com/shop/treforbazett
SOCIALS:
►Twitter (math based): / treforbazett
►TikTok: / drtrefor

[@DrTrefor]

What tricks to you all like for writing in LaTeX?

[@PrakashKumar-wt9jk]

Sir how to write list of figure , list of table and list of content in centre?

[@kevins407]

AutoHotKey is my winner. I have my preamble modularized and stored as AHK commands. So every time I have a project, I can quickly pick and choose which packages are helpful and can load them with a few quick keystrokes. I also have common commands (including graphics, enumerations, etc.) stored as AHK commands.

[@FelipeBalbi]

To make my life easier, I have setup a bunch of custom emacs snippets to expand to common blocks I use all the time. I also have a preamble.tex with all my favorite packages and custom tikz colors and styles. I just \input it on whatever new document. Maybe I should convert it into a style sheet

[@marcoszukunft7104]

Really good tricks. I always love the new command to save life. Specially for parentheses: \left( #1 ight)

[@richgold5503]

Very succinct expo. Could you make a video on chemical structure and professional referencing like the Royal Society of Chemistry, please.

[@jamesknapp64]

As a math teacher at a small community college these have been a massive blessing. I've only ever been self taught with LaTex so this series has help make the notes look a LOT better.

[@DrTrefor]

Thanks for sharing!

[@potterlover96]

This is amazing! I used LaTeX for my Uni dissertation 5 years ago but barely used it since and I'm trying to get back into it, this has been a massive help!

[@keira04]

Thank you again! I've written about 10 homework assignments in LaTeX thanks to you, and I'm still learning and growing! :)

[@akashbanerjee8554]

Great tricks, never knew we can use Latex in such clever ways. THANK YOU

[@DrTrefor]

Happy to help!

[@martinopinto6323]

Oh yes, a new LaTeX video ❤❤ So happy that Overleaf is supporting this!

[@MyStuffWH]

I commented on an earlier video that the overly positive tone on Overleaf functionalities was a bit tiring (especially if you are already an Overleaf user!). This video really struck a perfect balance between information and sponsorship, for a product that I really believe in. I really love your content. Keep up the good work!

[@DrTrefor]

Thanks for sharing, it is a balance with paid partnerships for sure!

[@wjrasmussen666]

More LaTeX!!! Keep them coming.

[@keira04]

Agreed!!

[@fran9426]

Been using LaTeX for many years but this video was still very informative!!

[@arshadjaveed7877]

Newcommand and cref are my favourites. Thanks for sharing

[@mathsupgrade]

This came at such the right time! I've been learning latex thanks to your videos for the last few weeks. It's really fun and addictive!

[@DrTrefor]

Great to hear!

[@2funky4u88]

this is really helpful, i just started writing my homework in latex this semester (third semester) and it really improved my overall style and made for better and much nicer looking solutions

[@lucienkalmogo3448]

Really this is the best tutoriel about learning LateX on youtube. Thank you very much

[@file4318]

These tricks + vim + snippets = faster than by hand

[@MarcusWagnerBMW]

Amazing content, kep doing this, youre helping me so much

[@JustinInBlack]

When I need it the most, you made a video about it!!! you are amazing sir!

[@DrTrefor]

Glad I could help!

[@jorgebecerril2361]

WOW! Thanks for all the tips they are really awesome!

[@PerEng2405]

Brilliant tips.Thx.

[@putrawahyudi4825]

Thank you, Sir. This video really help me out.

[@DrTrefor]

Glad it helped!

[@RSLT]

Wow, great and time saver, Tricks.

[@DrTrefor]

Glad you liked it

[@FelipeBalbi]

Cleveref seems to be super cool. I’ll start using it! If you’re looking for video ideas, I suggest a video focused on tikz graph drawing, perhaps also the fit library and tikz layers. To be honest, tikz is such a great package. It keeps impressing me over and over again even though I’ve used it for years 😅

[@DrTrefor]

Great ideas! I've done a whole video on tikz, but truly that package is enormous with so many cool things.

[@user-fh9rc3sy8c]

Cleveref is worth is weight in gold thank you!

[@yash1152]

10:47 thanks a lot for showing concrete example for textit vs emph commands. nice :)

[@DrTrefor]

You are welcome!

[@peterflom6878]

Very useful tips

[@hgfuhgvg]

Overleaf is awesome

[@kin_1997]

oka you have got me hooked on LaTeX

[@gevillgar]

The \includeonly command was sooo useful to me while I was writing mi thesis

[@canal_interpolo]

Trefor, could you make a video showing how to incorporate Matlab code on LaTeX documents?

[@captainchicky3744]

ngl exporting custum definitions to a .sty was a nice tip thanks lol

[@GeoffryGifari]

Lol i wished i knew about all this when i first started writing in LaTeX. The kind of environment i'm in just let people dive in directly and learn on our own so inefficient writing is kind of normal, but i guess so far that's the best way to do it. Btw, on the "Be Semantic" section, it seems like there are these special commands that "understand" the intention of the writer (\emph, ewtheorem, etc) what other commands are there? do you happen to know a reference/keyword to search for this? and are there commands to be used outside the context of pure math (like physics)? Thanks!

[@VitruvianSasquatch]

Might seem odd, but I find the \qty command from the physics package a much cleaner way to do auto-sizing braces than the traditional \left( ight). Also comes with handy calculus commands.

[@niuniujunwashere]

indeed, \qty() would be a nice shorthand \left( and ight)! i would like to address one subtle detail about SPACING which might one day catch you by surprise (as it did me)... \qty creates an Ord atom (judging from the package source code) while \left ... ight creates an Inner atom, so in some cases you wouldn't get spaces for \qty where you normally would for \left ... ight. (for example, with "(2) \left(3 ight)" you get a thin space between (2) and (3), but with "(2) \qty(3)" you have the two numbers glued together. same thing goes for \left(2 ight) \left(3 ight) and \qty(2) \qty(3). this EXTRA space is sometimes also undesirable-namely as the argument of a function-but i'll get into that shortly) likewise, \qty with a fixed size (like \qty\bigg) also creates an Ord atom (as it seems), unlike pairs like \biggl and \biggr which produce Open and Close atoms respectively (their definitions are essentially \mathopen\bigg and \mathclose\bigg). compare \gcd\qty\big(a, b) and \gcd\bigl(a, b\bigr) for instance (i intentionally picked an operator that is not overridden by physics). you'll see that a spurious thin space is added between \gcd and the parentheses produced by \qty, since TeX adds a thin space between Op and Ord atoms but doesn't between Op and Open atoms. (on a positive note, although \sin\qty(3) doesn't give the right spacing, \sin(3) does get the spacing right! though you would still need \bigl ...\bigr and the like for manual sizing since \sin simply doesn't see \bigl or (3) when you write \sin\bigl(3)...) i personally either use \bigl ...\bigr for a fixed-size argument or \mleft ...\mright defined by the mleftright package for a variable-size argument. in addition, as an alternative i STRONGLY recommend using \DeclarePairedDelimiter from the mathtools package since it takes care of spacing very VERY well. (i just learned while writing this that it ACTUALLY expands to \mathopen and \mathclose!! the implementation is hella complicated tho....) in this case you can write \DeclarePairedDelimiter\paren\lparen paren and replace \qty(...) with \paren*{...}, \qty\big(...) with \paren[\big]{...}, all while not getting ANY spurious space when writing stuff like \sin\paren{3} (even when a punctuation follows it!) spacing nuances are one of the reasons i don't use physics anymore, but whether or not you are going use it is completely up to you!

[@VitruvianSasquatch]

@@niuniujunwashere That's actually really good to know, thank you. I'll play with defining my own delimiters a bit.

[@laufert7100]

Only problem is that I use the siunitx package that overwrites \qty. Is there a way to use both?

[@2003z440]

If you haven't heard of it, I highly recommend the "exam" document class. It allows you to hide the solutions and format the blank spaces where students can answer.

[@davidvrba9]

Nice video, very helpful! While watching video question came up to my mind, can you ref. to equations in different .tex files that are included?

[@DrTrefor]

Yup!

[@matheusjahnke8643]

Another comment about the "be semantic" topic: sometimes you don't have freedom to format. Sections must be centralized, enumerated with roman numerals, with specific size and all.... If you were doing this "manually", It'd be quite the job. If you are lucky, the required format is available as a style or a class... so you just \section{stuff} and don't worry about it. (Frankly if you are doing it manually, just use a What-You See-Is-What-You-Get tool, there might even be a template with the format available).

[@prabhjeetsingharora]

Hello sir. If I want to use Eq. instead of eq. in my document using cleverref. Can you please shed help in this regard? Thank you for creating such videos.

[@amolrupakheti7828]

Is there some way to import a table from one .tex file to another .tex file

[@xrenynthemusicmage6422]

doesn't the autoref command from the hyperref package do the exact same thing as cleveref?

[@markaustin3858]

Love the hoodie!! Where can I get one?

[@DrTrefor]

I love that one too:D Beautifulequation.com!

[@matheusjahnke8643]

About Cleveref... does it has an option to "link" to the equation? The ef{stuff} (the one not from Cleveref) makes the number clickable, if you do that, you can go to the equation, does Cleveref has something like that?

[@mikawatzel3272]

Hello Sir, thank you for these Tipps. Unfortunately cleveref doesn't load .... it promts me with "package not found". I've already tried different LaTex IED with the same error... Do you know something about that? Thank you very much.

[@xdevilwarrior]

I can't wait for AI to finally erradicate Latex from the phase of the earth... but this is video is cool :3

[@noob_techie2475]

Off topic but can you please recomment a good book to get a refresher learn more on euclidean geometry, and basic of all common shapes like ellipse, parabola etc.

[@dominicellis1867]

Do you have an intro video on latex, I’m a math teacher but I’ve never used it. I make all my assignments on paper or drawing apps and copy them. Apparently it takes for ever.

[@peterflom6878]

Is there a transcript available?

[@bungaIowbill]

This is a great video. I have used LaTeX for over ten years now and actually didn't know about Cleveref, and while I knew about conditional formatting, I actually never bothered to learn how it works... And the fact that you don't need brackets around the name of ewcommands? My life has been a lie! Regarding Cleveref: my preference is to capitalize the cross-reference names, which can be done with \usepackage[capitalize]{cleveref}. However, I would also like it to behave as \eqref when referring to equations, i.e., not write out the word "equation" at all, but just its number in parentheses. Does anyone happen to know of a quick way to get this behavior?

[@DrTrefor]

Ha! Probably better practice to include { ame} to be honest, but no you don't technically need it for a single parameter thing. Nice note about cleverref. I do believe it can be customized as you suggested but don't know exactly how off the top of my head.

[@roberttelarket4934]

I love your sweat shirt with EAT SLEEP MVTH REPEAT

[@wjrasmussen666]

Dr Trefor Bazett have you deleted some playlists? I thought you had many more playlists....

[@ademusmeal9058]

How to get latex format? dr.

[@Mr.AIFella]

One thing I couldn't make it perfect, even with the help of ChatGPT. I was trying to have two figures (flowcharts) next to each other and the table set next to them. I spent whole night but I gave up😢. I did it easily in word by making the figures to set inside tables.

[@realunderachiever]

Question. Can you include a video file in your latex presentation, let's say that presentation is made using beamer? I' ve tried a lot of different stuff and it doesn't work.

[@DrTrefor]

Not directly. The output traditionally is a pdf and video isn't part of the .pdf format. A beamer presentation is just a pdf. However, there are some things like I think one is called ximera that use latex to make say an html page that can include video.

[@lutherlessor4029]

"Squiggly Brackets">"Braces"

[@DrTrefor]

haha, I intellectually know people call them braces but refuse to do so:D

[@airman122469]

Anyone else here not like Overleaf? I personally like having my files local, and not on someone else’s machine. I also like being able to craft my own LaTex environment. Am I alone in this?

[@DrTrefor]

I think this is also totally fine. I did my entire PhD locally, for instance. Especially if you are using things like GitHub for versioning/collaboration, but it depends a bit of personal preference and ease of doing things imo:/

[@YousafAli-ge9ip]

😂😂😂

[@Argletrough]

you can omit the brackets in the first trick: \pd z x

[@gateronblackinksv2173]

If you want to do it even faster, you have to switch away from overleaf to something like vim. Vim snippets are so nice and they save so so so much time

[@floppy8568]

mforallth