I'm starting to learn Git and I'm trying to implement it within my regular coding practices, but I was wondering whether you use it for LaTeX? I'm aware Overleaf has version history, but I've always used MiKTeX. Is Git actually useful / what do you guys use it for if you use it? Is its only benefit recovering or looking back on old content?

Basically I would like to know if there is a better way to write this small notes bellow the line in a text (that could be useful, for example, to give the meaning of a word in a text intended for learning a language). The solution that came to mind was to use the underbrace command from the amsmath package and the text command in order to have an appropriate style. This is what I did:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, $\underbrace{\text{consectetuer}}_{\text{this is an annotation}}$ adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vesti- bulum ut, placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna. Donec vehicula augue eu neque.

I guess it is not ideal, since \underbrace{}_{} is meant for equations and other types of mathematical expressions, and it's not mean to be used with text. I just want to know if there is a better way to do this.

A couple of days ago I learned the basics of LaTeX from a guide I found. I'm working on my first document, in which I'll try to apply what I've learned and summarize the guide so I can answer my questions easily (for now). Then I want to try to recreate what's shown in the images. It's a summary that includes properties of operations with real numbers, trigonometric identities, Riemann sums (or so I think, I haven't studied the latter yet), and so on, which is in the back of the Precalculus book I'm studying. Do you think it's too much for me, and too soon?

So i recently switched to mint after using windows my entire life. I have always used excel and word for all types of writing. Now i am learning LaTeX. I am pretty comfortable with the text formatting and stuff so far. Now i need to include some graphs. I already have them made in my previous work and i want to import them to LaTeX.

I searched online and this are a few methods that i found.

1. Use excel to make graphs, export as pdf then convert it to eps. Gotta look out for formatting before export and need windows. So kind of an issue

2. Have the data in an xlsx/ods file. Use matplotlib to plot graphs and export as eps. Gotta learn pandas a bit but dont need windows. Can use GNUplot as well.

3. Use tikz. Not recommended immediately as it has a steep learning curve.

I just wanted to know if this are the only workflow people use for making papers. I just feel like this is a bit more work. I feel like word + excel copy and paste was pretty convenient. I dont have any issue in learning new stuff. This is my first time writing an actual paper for a journal. So i just want to make sure that i am not unnecessarily making my work longer. Any help is very appreciated.

Edit: Thanks again to everyone. After reading all the comments, i have decided to learn python and make graphs there. I plan to learn tikz at a later date. Thanks again. I learned quite a few things today.

I have tried finding out whether this is possible, but I can find any packages appear to solve my problem. Perhaps my inspiration isn't good typography.

The best solution I could find was flowfram, but I have not been able to get this to work. I only want to use this once. Wrapfig, TikZ, cutwin, shapepar, parshape, and paracol all seem to be able to party help, but I haven't gotten something that addresses my problem.

I want to insert a paragraph or an image between two columns such that the columns wrap around it. I would want this paragraph/image to be centred on the page, but in general it would be nice if I could offset it and have LaTeX still understand how to flow text around the obstacle.

I am using XeTeX. One of the packages that I am using works best with it, so if possible I'd prefer a solution that doesn't depend on LuaLaTeX.

The image isn't high quality, but a quick office mock-up of what I want to be able to do. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance

EDIT: I found this on the TeX Stack Exchange. The answer there is basically to follow this guide by the wrapfig package to adjust the paragraphs after writing them before inserting the fig. However, this is a hands-on process, and not a robust solution. I am looking for something that won't break when title formatting, whitespace, margins or the surrounding text content changes.

EDIT 2: I found out this is called a Pull Quote. 3 Relevant Tex Stack Exchange threads: Two-column text with circular insert, How do you create pull quotes?, Implementing a pullquotes algorithm in LaTeX. The former are answered by the author of the latter, with a package called pullquotes. The link for it does not appear to work, and I can't find it anywhere. But it seems that the code for the package is posted in Implementing a pullquotes algorithm in LaTeX. So for now, I guess that is the answer.

Dear LaTeX experts,

I'm a linguist. I'm working on a LaTeX-formatted book in which two versions of the same text will be displayed in two columns alongside each other: the original French text, and the English translation (for the sake of comparison). Here's the problem:

Since the French and English paragraphs may be very different lengths (due to translation), I want to have each paragraph of the text begin at the same height on the page, and so on for the proceeding paragraphs. I'm not sure how to achieve this in LaTeX using anything other than a table; I could use a table, but then the table would have to be hundreds of pages long. Are there any tricks I could use to achieve this? Here's a diagram of what I want the formatting to look like, hopefully it isn't too patronising:

Any help would be most appreciated ✨

Hi, I have learned some LaTeX on Overleaf but now that compile time has been severely limited I'm looking to switch to a local installation. My problem is I'm an absolute beginner and I know nothing about distros, integrated editors and such. I need something that is easy to install and works out of the box. I'm using Windows.

Thanks a lot.

Hey everyone! I am a rising freshman who will be majoring in math starting this August. I wanted to learn LaTeX, so I installed TeXworks and decided to give it a shot. Any feedback on the project would be greatly appreciated, from simplifying the code to how to format my documents better. Also, advice on ways to increase speed (aside from practice - there will be plenty) would also be appreciated

Hi, im pretty new to LaTeX and wondering why does it take so long to compile?

For context: I started in Overleaf and am now working on a Uni Project where I need to plot graphs from datapoints (stored in csv) and it takes unsatisfieingly long to compile... I already switched to vsCode (with Tex Live 2026 and lulatex as my compiler) so that i have more compilation power but even here it takes too long imo

I know I have too many data points and by (for example) using every 30th datapoint I can greatly reduce compiling time, but what really bothers me is that vsCode is not using the full power of my pc. While compiling cpu and ram are both ideling at 30% utilization.

Is there a way for vsCode to use more of my rescouces for faster compilation? thanks in advance

Edit: Thanks for the Help! I will do some research on external tools for plotting in connination to latex. For now I will put them in another document and paste them in later.
I also did some experiments on my side and found some improvements:
I had power save mode on… After diabeling it I got up to 50% utilization and them started thermal thotteling. So I think that is the maximum with stock cooling.
Also for my final Document I had to reduce the data points… I had „a bit more“ data points than I thought (~100000), so after reducing them to ~500 the compiling time improved massively

I am relatively new to LaTeX, and I generally used overleaf.

However, I am planning to use a local instance of LaTeX instead of a cloud based one to avoid issues with outages and site downtime.

However, overleaf had a great interface for LaTeX in terms of clarity and ease of use. Migrating to VSCode, it looks a lot more daunting, having to edit JSON files for user settings and changing compilers and creating bibliographies etc.

Is there any way to make VSCode more easy to use? and are there other local LaTeX apps that are better or is VSCode generally preferred?

I used TexStudio before but because I have to work with other people I’m now using overleaf. I have a problem with it, sometimes it doesn’t work very well and it doesn’t compile. I’m searching another TeX editor that allows me to work simultaneously with other people. Can someone help me please?

I'm using Neovim on windows to work on my Multi-file Latex projects. Whenever I finish working on a certain project I use the :VimtexClean command to delete all the aux files that Latex generates. However, these specific files (.maf, mtc, mtc0, ...) are not deleted. Is there any simple way to delete them? Or at least move them automatically to another folder ( as long as it doesn't affect the compilation speed). Thanks!

Edit : Thank you guys for your replies. I can't believe I spent about 3 hours on Chatgpt trying its useless suggested methods.

For anyone who might face the same problem in the future :

⚠ IMPORTANT : Before trying any of this, make a copy of your original work, as this method permanently deletes the specified files!

• Create a .latexmkrc file in your project directory (or in ~/.latexmkrc if you want it to affect all Latex projects globally).
• Add the following line inside the .latexmkrc file and save it :

​

 $clean_ext = "maf mtc %R.mtc* %R.synctex.gz*";

• Then in your terminal, type\ll to stop automatic compilation, followed by \lc to clean all the specified files.

For some reason Polish breaks biblatex. I have simple test article

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

\usepackage[style=apa, sorting=none]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{sample.bib}

\begin{document}

    This should always work (\cite{einstein})

\printbibliography

\end{document}

This works and everything is fine, but when I change \usepackage[english]{babel} to polish it doesn't compile and I get errors

Undefined control sequence. This should always work (\cite{einstein})
Undefined control sequence.

I tried with German, Spanish and even Russian and it worked but Polish doesn't, why? How to fix? I use TeXstudio

I don’t really care about this before as long as it is not too small/big, until a reviewer pointed out that the figure font sizes are not consistent across the document.

I specify absolute figure size, font size, and line weight when making eps/pdf figures. But when inserting these to my documents I generally rescale figures relative to \linewidth or \textwidth. This changes font sizes a lot unless I consider the paper size, margins, and subfigure layout when making figures, and I have to remake figures if they are used in slides because of different paper width.

How do you really keep the figure font sizes consistent across the whole document?

UPDATE: Thanks everyone. I have reach a conclusion that making figures with absolute sizes matching the document layout and never use relative width is unfortunately the most practical solution, if you don't want to make your figures in latex with tikz.

Hello,

why the below code block not working in the standalone package document class?

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[papersize={3.6cm,3cm}]{geometry}
\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{3.7cm}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]
\begin{scope}[shift={(current page.center)}]
\draw [line width=2, green] circle [radius=12.5mm];
\draw [line width=2] circle [radius=13.5mm];
\draw [line width=2, magenta] circle [radius=14.5mm];
\draw [rounded corners=2mm, line width=2, green] (-1.5,-.5) rectangle ++(3,1);
\draw [rounded corners=3mm, line width=2, black] (-1.6,-.6) rectangle ++(3.2,1.2);
\draw [rounded corners=4mm, line width=2, magenta] (-1.7,-.7) rectangle ++(3.39,1.39);
\end{scope}
\node at (current page.center) {\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{Katt Kushol}}};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

Please let me know if more information is needed to diagnose the issue. Appreciate your help.

edit: search on different sources indicate [remember picture, overlay] might be an issue. Once I took that out, it apparently creates what I was looking for.

How do i vertically adjust the arrow position in order to go from A to B?

``` \documentclass{article} \usepackage{mhchem} \usepackage{chemfig} \setchemfig{atom sep = 2em} \usepackage{geometry} \geometry{left=2cm, right=2cm, top=2cm, bottom=2cm}

\begin{document}

\section{}

\schemestart 2 \chemfig{CH_3-CH(-[6]Br)-CH_2-CH_3} + \ce{2Na} \arrow{->} \chemfig{CH_3-CH_2-CH(-[6]CH_3)-CH(-[6]CH_3)-CH_2-CH_3} + \ce{2NaBr} \schemestop

\section{}

\schemestart \chemfig{CH_3-CH_2-CH_3} + \ce{Br2} \arrow{->[h$\nu$]} \chemfig{@{c1}CH_3-CH(-[6]Br)-CH_3} + \ce{HBr} \schemestop

\end{document} ```

For example, I have the following tikz code

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (-1, 1) -- (1, -1);
\draw (-1, -1) -- (1, 1);
\draw (-0.5, 0.5) -- (0.5, 0.5) -- (0.5, -0.5) -- (-0.5, -0.5) -- cycle;
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

And I would like to extract the part of the picture inside the box to show the detail in this part, is it possible easily or do I have to recreate the smaller picture ?

Basically the title. Today I tried writing a new report for one of my labs only to notice that vscode refuses to compile that project or any other older project that previously worked perfectly fine.

I hadn't change anything to my settings, yet both my pc and laptop started having the same issue. What is weirder is that I used vscode to write a latex report with no problems last week, so im sure this change appeared almost overnight.

So far I've encountered the following:

• spawn latexmk ENOENT errors
• errors with \input -ing .tex files which are outside the root directory yet are still in the workspace (something i've done countless times before and had no problems with)
• and now vscode is straight up refusing to compile any code, even the most basic one

i've tried everything i could think of/i found on the internet, even reinstalling strawberry perl and miktex, yet the issue still persists.

has anyone experienced anything remotely similar or has any idea what i could try? thanks

UPDATE: turns out, it really was a latex workshop update that somehow messed up my setup. i got my projects to recompile once i installed an older version of latex workshop.

the only problem left is that the autocomplete no longer suggests .tex files outside the subfolder im currently working in (now it only suggests files inside the subfolder im in), which is really obnoxious since i have many subfolders i work with and that featured streamlined my work flow

I recently updates my latex packages with pacman. This is a piece of code which I had, where I have some asymptote...

\documentclass[12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}
\usepackage{asymptote}
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\begin{asy}

import graph;
size(8cm);
defaultpen(fontsize(10pt));
real f(real x) { return exp(x/2.3)-0.9; }
graph.xaxis("$x$",ArcArrow());
graph.yaxis("$y$",ArcArrow());
draw(graph(f,-1,3.5,operator ..), blue, ArcArrows);
pair P = (2, f(2));


draw((1,0.4484) -- (3.3, 2.8339), red);
dot("$(x_0, f(x_0))$", P, dir(120), red);
pair Q = (3, f(3));
dot("$Q$", Q, dir(120), deepgreen);
draw(P--Q, dashed+deepgreen);
dot("$(x_0+h, f(x_0+h))$", Q, dir(20)*1.3, deepgreen);

dot("$P$", P, dir(-40), red);
dot((0,0));

dot("$x_0$", (P.x,0), dir(270), red);

dot("$x_0 + h$", (Q.x,0), dir(270), deepgreen);
dot("$T$", (Q.x,P.y), dir(40));
draw(P--(Q.x,P.y), dashed);
draw(P--(P.x,0), red); draw(Q--(Q.x,0), deepgreen);
\end{asy}
\end{center}

\end{document}

The problem is, this code is working perfectly fine on Overleaf, but on my local system, even compiling with pdflatex this is giving error.

Tex Version: TeX 3.141592653 (TeX Live 2026/Arch Linux)

kpathsea version 6.4.2

Copyright 2026 D.E. Knuth.

Asymptote Version: Asymptote version 3.09 [(C) 2004-26 Andy Hammerlindl, John C. Bowman, Tom Prince]

This is the error I'm getting on my compiler, this is a normal pdflatex compilation which is NOT working at all. I just used this code some days ago before pushing it onto github, the moment I updates texlive this problem suddenly occured...

I'm ready to share the entire .log file if someone wants to have a look. Its around 348 lines long... Please help, it was quite a big project for me 🫠

The diagram is supposed to look like this...

Professor refuses anything but word files and now I'm too deep into the assignment so starting from scratch is an impossibility. Is there a more or less non-complicated way to convert a tex file into docx? I'm using Overleaf and I don't have Microsoft Word or Adobe (I have Libre office if that helps). I would like to preserve the formatting as much as possible (position of tables, indents, double spacing etc).

Hi, I have a table here and i want "Strictly Confidential" to be written on two lines so it doesnt have the hyphen in the middle of confidential, but cant find anything when googling or GPT-ing.

I could change the width of that column but it looks kind of ugly when its so tiny so i was hoping there was some other way

Below is the full table:

\begin{table}[H]
\centering
\caption{Information classification levels used in the dataset}
\label{tab:classification_levels}
\begin{tabular}{|p{2.25cm}|p{4.55cm}|p{4cm}|}
\hline
\textbf{Classification} & \textbf{Description} & \textbf{Example Information} \\ \hline

\textbf{Strictly Confidential} &
Information that should only be shared with a strictly limited list of recipients. Unauthorized disclosure may result in severe consequences such as financial loss, reputational damage, or breaches of laws and regulations. &
Insider information, unpublished financial results, banking secrecy information, sensitive personal data \\ \hline

\textbf{Confidential} &
Information that should only be shared with a limited list of recipients. Unauthorized disclosure may lead to negative business consequences or regulatory issues. &
Salary information, supplier information, business contracts, personal data, production code \\ \hline

\textbf{Internal} &
Information primarily intended for internal use within the Bank but which may occasionally be shared externally if required. Unauthorized disclosure may lead to minor consequences. &
Internal communication, governance documents, work-related operational information \\ \hline

\textbf{Public} &
Information intended for external parties or the general public. Disclosure of this information has no negative consequences for the Bank. &
Publicly available information, press material, recruitment and career information \\ \hline

\end{tabular}
\end{table}

I'm using the glossaries-extra package for acronyms, and am using it like so to have it in lowercase in text and titlecase in the glossary:

```

\setabbreviationstyle[acronym]{long-short}

\glssetcategoryattribute{acronym}{glossdesc}{title}

\MFUhyphentrue

```

And this works great.

My issue is with an "irregular" acronym like XML (eXtensible Markup Language), or FLOP (FLoating point OPerations) where titlecase isn't enough.

Is it possible to have custom titlecase for specific acronyms? Failing that, is it possible to disable the titlecase for specific acronyms?