I am doing some end of the year cleaning on my hard drive and just uploaded the Jupyter Notebook I used in the analysis of a mobile phone lying still earlier this year. For some future studies, I thought it would be interesting to explore the PDF export functionality from Jupyter. That worked very well except for that I didn’t get any title or author name on top: ...
I have been doing quite a lot of manuscript editing recently and realize that many people—including academics—don’t understand the differences between the symbols hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. So here is a quick explanation: hyphen (-): is used to join words (“music-related motion”). You type this character with the Minus key on the keyboard, so it is the easiest one to use. en-dash (–): is used to explain relationships between two concepts (“action–sound couplings”) or in number series (0–100). I haven’t found a way to type this on Ubuntu, but on Windows, you can use the Alt key and press the ASCII code 0150. On Mac, you get it by pressing the Option key together with the Minus key. In Markdown and HTML code, it can be written with the command –. In LaTeX, it is written --. em-dash (—): is used to break up a sentence—like this one—and can be used instead of commas (,). On Ubuntu, it can be typed with the Alt gr key together with the Minus key. On Windows, you can use the Alt key and press the ASCII code 0151. Mac is the most logical, using the Option and Shift keys together with Minus. In Markdown and HTML code, it can be written as —. In LaTeX, it is written ---. Looking around, I see that it is actually even more complex than this. On a How-To Geek page I learned that the minus sign used in mathematics (−7) is not a hyphen but has its own ASCII code and HTML representation: −. I also learned that from a typographical perspective, there are also “non-breaking hyphens” (‑), “figure dash” (‒), and “horizontal bar” (―). ...
Quotation marks are used for different things in texts. Sometimes they are used to mark actual quotations, things that people have said and written. Other times they are used to mark a word, such as this is “funny”. Some people also use them to Single vs double quotes There is not a right or wrong when it comes to using single (’) or double (") quotes. Different style guides say different things, so use whatever is suggested. In any case, the most important is being consistent. ...
Earlier today I was asked about what tools I use when writing. This is not something I have written about here on the blog before, although I do have very strong opinions on my own tools. I actually really enjoy reading about how other people work, so writing about it here may perhaps also be interesting to others. Text editor: Atom Most of my writing, whether it is e-mail drafts, meeting notes, or academic papers, is done in the form of plain text files. I use different text editors dependent on what computer/platform I am working on, and that is also one of the beauties of text files. They work everywhere. On my main laptop (running Ubuntu Studio), I primarily use Atom as my main text editor. This is mainly because it is cross-platform, has some plugins that are useful, and has excellent integration with Github. ...
After I mentioned that I used LaTeX for an ERC Starting Grant application in a previous blog post, I have gotten several questions from people about what type of LaTeX template I used. Unfortunately, the ERC does not provide any LaTeX template, only templates for MS Word and OpenOffice. My scientific workflow is so dependent on LaTeX/BibTeX that I decided to recreate a LaTeX document setup that resembled the MS Word template. The end result is not identical to the MS Word output, but it is pretty close. The most important is that I did not get any complaints from the ERC about the looks of the document (and I made it to the final Brussel interviews last year, though not getting funded, unfortunately). ...
When creating figures for papers written in LaTeX, I have found it aesthetically unpleasing to have different fonts in the figures than in the text. Most figures I create in either OmniGraffle or Matlab, and here I have relied on regular OS X fonts. Fortunately, I have discovered that it is possible to use LaTeX fonts in OS X. Apparently, this is now included as a feature in the latest version(s) of the MacTeX distribution (?), but I also discovered that it is possible to just download the fonts (as OTF files) and install them directly: ...
I have been working on an ERC Starting Grant application over the last months. Besides the usual conceptual/practical challenges of writing funding applications, this particular application also posed the challenge of writing not only one proposal document, but two: one long (15 pages) and one short (5 pages). I am used to writing research papers and applications where you are dealing with three levels: title abstract content But for the ERC application I had to handle four levels: ...
I have already written about how to compact lists earlier today. Now is the time to compact the bibliography… This is how the regular bibliography in LaTeX looks like: First I found a suggestion to use the setspace function, but it turns out that it is much easier to just use the bibsep option to natbib. Just add the following to the preamble: ...
I have for a long time been struggling with making lists more compact in LaTeX. While the standard lists often look good, as seen in the example below, there are times when space limits, etc. makes it necessary to save some space. Up until now I have been using things like the rather ugly \vspace{-7pt} command to remove space between list items. Now I finally decided to figure out a better solution. While there are many different package to help with this, it seems like the enumitem package is the newest and most comprehensive solution for making compact lists. ...
I tend to move between different computers/devices and OSes all the time, and have started to become very tired of storing text data in different formats that are either not compatible or tend to mess up the formatting between different applications (e.g. RTF files). To avoid this I am now testing to write all my text-based documents (notes, memos, letters, etc.) using MultiMarkDown. This is a so-called Lightweight markup language, similar to e.g. Textile. The reason I chose MultiMarkDown is mainly because I liked the syntax over that of Textile, and that MultiMarkDown seems more alive than its predecessor MarkDown. ...