I’ve been using TeX to write linguistics papers for nearly a decade now. I still think it’s the best option. Since TeX is a big, complex ecosystem and not at all designed with linguists in mind, I thought it might be helpful to describe the tools and workflow I use to produce my papers, handouts, and abstracts.<\/p>\n
Michael Becker<\/a>‘s notes<\/a> are recommended as well.<\/p>\n I use Secondly, it expects UTF-8. If you are using Linguists generally demand the following types of characters:<\/p>\n The only font I’ve found that has all this is Linux Libertine<\/a>. It has nothing to do with Linux, per se. In general, it’s pretty handsome, especially when printed small (though the Q<\/em> is ridiculously large). If you can deal without small caps (and arguably, linguists use them too much), then a recent version of Times New Roman (IPA characters were added recently) also fits the bill. Unfortunately, if you’re on Linux and using the “MS Core Fonts”, that version of Times New Roman doesn’t have the IPA characters.<\/p>\n This is real important: do not allow your mathematical characters to be in Computer Modern if your paper is not in Computer Modern. It sticks out like a sore thumb. What you do is put something like this in the preamble:<\/p>\n The I use I use I type There are a couple interesting things here. Up until you’re done, start your file like so:<\/p>\n This will do two things: “overfull\u00a0hboxes” will be marked with a black line, so you can rewrite and fix them. Secondly, images won’t be rendered into the PDF, which saves time. It’s very easy to tell who does this and who doesn’t.<\/p>\n There are several TeX-based tools for making slides and posters. Beamer seems to be very popular for slides, but I find the default settings very ugly\u00a0(gradients!) and cluttered (navigation buttons on every slide!). I use a very minimal<\/a> Keynote style (Helvetica Neue, black on white). I’m becoming a bigger fan of handouts, since unlike slides or posters, the lengthy process of making a handout gets me so much closer to publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been using TeX to write linguistics papers for nearly a decade now. I still think it’s the best option. Since TeX is a big, complex ecosystem and not at all designed with linguists in mind, I thought it might be helpful to describe the tools and workflow I use to produce my papers, handouts, … Continue reading “TeX tips for linguists”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self","tag-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":942,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Software<\/h2>\n
xetex<\/code> (this is the same as xelatex<\/code>) from XeTeX. It has two advantages over the traditional pdflatex<\/code> and related tools. First, you can use system fonts via fontspec<\/code> and mathspec<\/code>. If you are using Computer Modern or packages like txfonts<\/code> or times<\/code>, etc., it’s time to join the modern world.<\/p>\ntipa<\/code>, or multi-character sequences to enter non-ASCII characters, then you probably have ugly transcriptions. (Don’t want to name names…)<\/p>\nFonts<\/h2>\n
\n
\usepackage{mathspec}\r\n\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Times New Roman}\r\n\setmathfont(Digits,Greek,Latin){Times New Roman}\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\nExamples<\/h2>\n
gb4e<\/code> package seems to be the best one for syntax-style examples, with morph-by-morph glossing and the like. I myself deal mostly in phonology, so I use the tabular<\/code> environment wrapped with an example environment of my own creation called simplex.sty<\/code> and packaged in my own LingTeX<\/a> (which is a work-in-progress).<\/p>\nBibliographies<\/h2>\n
natbib<\/code>. When I have a choice, I usually reach for pwpl.bst<\/code><\/a>, the bibliography style that we use for the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics<\/a>. It’s loosely based on the Linguistic Inquiry style.<\/p>\nCompiling<\/h2>\n
make<\/code> for compiling. This will be installed on most Linux computers. On Macintoshes, you can get it as part of the Developer Tools package, or with Xcode.<\/p>\nmake<\/code> to compile, make bib<\/code> to refresh the bibliography, and make clean<\/code> to remove all the temporary files. Here’s what a standard Makefile for paper.tex<\/code> would look like for me.<\/p>\n # commands\r\n PDFTEX=xelatex -halt-on-error\r\n BIBTEX=bibtex\r\n\r\n # files\r\n NAME=paper\r\n\r\n all: $(NAME).pdf\r\n\r\n $(NAME).pdf: $(NAME).tex $(NAME).bib *.pdf\r\n $(PDFTEX) $(NAME).tex\r\n $(BIBTEX) $(NAME).tex\r\n $(PDFTEX) -interaction=batchmode -no-pdf $(NAME).tex\r\n $(PDFTEX) -interaction=batchmode $(NAME).tex\r\n\r\n clean:\r\n latexmk -c\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n-halt-on-error<\/code> kills a compile the second it goes bad: why wouldn’t you want to fix the problem right when it’s detected, since it won’t produce a full PDF anyways? Both -interaction=batchmode<\/code> and -no-pdf<\/code> shave off a considerable amount of compile time, but aren’t practical when debugging, and when producing a final PDF, respectively. I use latexmk -c<\/code>, which reads the log files and removes temporary files but preserves the target PDF. For some reason, though, it doesn’t remove .bbl<\/code> files.<\/p>\nDraft mode<\/h2>\n
\documentclass[draft,12pt]{article}\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\nOn slides and posters<\/h2>\n