TITLE: Miscellaneous LaTeX snippets
DATE: 2019-09-30
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================


I spent Sunday afternoon researching a short list of things I 
wanted to fix in LaTeX to streamline my experience.

Define macros for formatted blocks

Sometimes I have to write a document like a CV or a set of handout 
notes which require reuse of a complex formatted block of text. For 
example, below, where I want to create a timeline of events with 
the date of the event on the left of the page, with a description 
of the event on the right. I can define a macro for this instead of 
writing the same boilerplate code every time. I stole this from a 
Luke Smith youtube video.

  [Luke Smith youtube video]: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvgP7IMeUn8

    \newcommand{\entry}[4]{

    \begin{minipage}[t]{0.15\textwidth}
    \hfill{} \textsc{#1}
    \end{minipage}
    \vline\hfill{}
    \begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}
    #2

    \textit{#3}

    \footnotesize{#4}
    \end{minipage}\\ \vspace{0.25cm}
    }

This macro has four insertion points for user input, defined in the 
square brackets and called with #n arguments. The macro places a 
small area to the left of the vertical line, then a larger one to 
the right.

To call the macro and give the user input:

    \entry{2014--2016}{Web dev}{More text}{This is a description}

  ![Formatted block for 
CV](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tips_latex/format_block.png)

Globally set image size

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{graphicx}
    \setkeys{Gin}{width=\linewidth, height=10cm, keepaspectratio}

    \begin{document}

    \begin{figure}
    \includegraphics{test.png}
    \end{figure}

    \end{document}

Globally center images

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{graphicx}

    \makeatletter
    \g@addto@macro\@floatboxreset{\centering}
    \makeatother

    \begin{document}

    \begin{figure}
    \includegraphics{test.png}
    \end{figure}

Figures in wrapped text

This uses the wrapfig package to make a right-aligned figure. The 
figure itself is 5 cm width and the image inside the figure is also 
5 cm.

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{graphicx}
    \usepackage{wrapfig}
    \usepackage{blindtext}

    \begin{document}

    \blindtext

    \begin{wrapfigure}{r}{5cm}
    \centering{}
    \includegraphics[width=5cm]{img}
    \caption{This is a caption}
    \label{right_img}
    \end{wrapfigure}

    \blindtext

    \end{document}

Custom directory for .bst files

.bst files are used to hold custom BibTeX reference styles. I have 
one that is based on the agsm style, but I've set it to not include 
URLs in the reference list, it's called agsmnourl.bst. In my LaTeX 
document I can use this style file with:

    \documentclass{article}

    \usepackage{natbib}
    \bibliographystyle{agsmnourl}  % Use custom template 
    \usepackage{cite}

    \begin{document}

    \citep{test}

    \bibliography{test}

    \end{document}

Previously I had kept agsmnourl.bst in the same directory as the 
project, but my laptop was quickly filling up with duplicates of 
the style file. I found out that latexmk which I use to compile 
LaTeX documents, can take a ~/latexmkrc file where certain 
variables can be defined. I can define a custom directory which 
holds these custom .bst files:

    $ENV{'TEXINPUTS'}='~/.texmf//:' . $ENV{'TEXINPUTS'};

In this case the directory is ~/.texmf.

Then, the next time I run latexmk it will source latexmkrc.