La Vignetterie.

LaTeX for philosophers.

A group of younger comrades have asked me to give my opinion in the press on problems relating to philosophy, particularly in reference to LaTeX in philosophy. I am not a philosophical expert and, of course, cannot fully satisfy the request of the comrades. As to LaTeX in philosophy…this is something directly in my field. I have therefore consented to answer a number of questions put by the comrades.

(I’d like to think my writing this is slightly less megalomaniac than Stalin’s writing ‘Marxism and problems of linguistics’, and that the two requests directed to me are not the sign of an incipient cult of personality.)

A first recommendation has nothing directly to do with LaTeX: use Zotero, an open-source reference management system. When reading most academic papers, inserting a reference is very quick: I click a button in my browser, and within about five seconds obtain the relevant output with \textcite{abc1923} into my LaTeX editor.

You will need first to set up an environment in which to use LaTeX. The simplest is Overleaf. Oxonians’ accounts are upgraded for free. If you are sufficiently obsessive to outgrow Overleaf, you will not need to consult this guide. Once you have set up Overleaf, you can set up an integration with Zotero.

This beginners’ guide is fairly helpful. Some further points.

  1. One frustration is that LaTeX and packages generate American dates. This can be rectified by including in the preamble \usepackage[british]{babel}.
  2. You may want BibLaTeX to generate e.g. year-date citations or similar. This can be achieved with \usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}.
  3. The LaTeX Font[sic] Catalogue includes sample code to change typeface.
  4. llms are fairly good at generating LaTeX code and debugging.
  5. For support for other languages, accents, and so on, the most straightforward option is to use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, as explained here.

À propos.

Étiquettes.

philo, LaTeX, typography.

Mises à jour.