Top 10 LaTeX packages for academic writing

In academic writing with L^aT_eX there are a lot of things that can be frustrating to the author. For many of these things there exists many packages that can help alleviate this frustration, but it is hard to find them. In this post I list 10 of my favorite packages to help remove some of this frustation, and make your papers look nicer so that you have a higher probability of getting your paper accepted. Hopefully.

Introduction

At the time of writing, The Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN) has 5841 packages. Many of these are used very often, such as amsmath, graphics and xcolor (Cormode et al., 2012), and some are not used enough. This post is a list of packages that I find very useful in academic writing, but yet I don’t see them being used enough. And a blog isn’t really a blog without a top ten list, I guess.

Without further ado, in alphabetical order, here are 10 useful L^aT_eX packages for your writing pleasure.

Packages

adjustbox

The adjustbox package (Scharrer, 2012) allows scaling of a figure or plot, for example one made in TikZ.

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\usepackage{adjustbox}                % Balances the columns of the last page

Here is an example from a real paper, slightly edited for clarity.

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\begin{figure}[t!]
    \centering
    \begin{adjustbox}{width=.75\linewidth}%
        \input{./figures/my_tikz_figure.tex}%
    \end{adjustbox}%
    \caption{An overview of our solution.}
    \label{fig:overview}
\end{figure}

balance or flushend

The two columns on the last page of a two-column paper should be the same length. This package saves you from having to balance the columns manually (Daly, 1999).

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\usepackage{balance}                % Balances the columns of the last page

Simply add \balance in the first column of the last page, and you’re done! Some users like the flushend package better as this doesn’t require adding anything on the last page.

No column balancing.

With balance.

With flushend.

Examples with and without column balancing using the 2019 SysML L^aT_eX template example.

booktabs

Simply put, booktabs (Fear, 2020) makes your tables look good!

Consider this example, adapted from Animal table with booktabs.png (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license).

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\usepackage{booktabs}              % Nicer tables

Booktabs example.

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\documentclass[10pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage[tableposition=top]{caption}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}
\centering
\caption{This is my table, there are many like it, but this one is mine.}
\label{tbl:mytable}
\begin{tabular}{llr}
\toprule
\multicolumn{2}{c}{Item} \\
\cmidrule(r){1-2}
Animal & Description & Price (\$) \\
\midrule
Gnat  & per gram & 13.65 \\
      & each     &  0.01 \\
Gnu   & stuffed  & 92.50 \\
Emu   & stuffed  & 33.33 \\
Armadillo & frozen & 8.99 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}

cleveref

Using the cleveref package (Cubitt, 2012), we can refer to figure, tables etc without specificing the type. See~\cref{tbl:mytable} produces “See table 1”.

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\usepackage[capitalise]{cleveref}  % Clever references to stuff.

The result is configurable, and we can for example change the figure type name with \crefname{figure}{Fig.}{Fig.}, where the first Fig. is the singular form and the second is the plural form.

glossaries-extra

Using the package glossaries-extra we can add a list of terms and a list of acronyms to our document (Talbot, 2016; Talbot, 2018). It is also very useful for making sure that acronyms are written out the first time they are used.

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\usepackage[acronym,toc,symbols]{glossaries-extra}
\usepackage{glossary-longbooktabs}
\setabbreviationstyle[acronym]{long-short}

\makeglossaries
\newacronym{gcd}{GCD}{Greatest Common Divisor}

\newglossaryentry{eta}{name={\ensuremath{\eta}}, sort={eta}, description={Learning rate}, type={symbols}}

\clearpage
\printglossary[type=symbols,style=long-booktabs]
\clearpage
\printglossary[type=acronym,style=long-booktabs]

We can then use \gls{gcd} whenever we need to use the acronym Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) or \gls{eta} when we need to use the symbol for the learning rate. See Glossaries on Overleaf for more examples.

microtype

Text typeset in L^aT_eX already looks great, but can be made even nicer with microtype (Schlicht, 2019). Looking deeper at the micro-typographics extensions provided by microtype is a great way to ensure getting trapped in a rabbit hole for a long time. Here are the settings I use, borrowed from the excellent post Tips on Writing a Thesis in L^aT_eX (Khirevich, n.d.).

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\usepackage[
    protrusion=true,
    activate={true,nocompatibility},
    final,
    tracking=true,
    kerning=true,
    spacing=true,
    factor=1100]{microtype}
\SetTracking{encoding={*}, shape=sc}{40}

Without microtype.

With microtype.

Examples with and without microtype. Examples were compiled with pdfL^aT_eX in TeX Live 2019.

pgfplots

The pgfplots package (Feuersänger, 2014) can be used for creating 2D and 3D plots. It is built on top of the PGF/TikZ package (Feuersänger et al., 2014) and allows the creation of high-quality, customizable, complex graphs, charts, or diagrams directly within your document.

The package supports a wide variety of plot types, such as line plots, scatter plots, bar plots, histograms, and contour plots. pgfplots can load data from external files, enabling generation of plots without leaving the L^aT_eX environment. Used together with tikzplotlib you can convert plots from matplotlib.

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\usepackage{pgfplots}

Example figure produced with this method.

See Publication ready figures for a longer post on the pgfplots package (Feuersänger, 2014).

siunitx

Typesetting numbers with units is actually not trivial. siunitx (Wright, 2009) adds, among others, the commands \SI and \num so that we can write \SI{1024}{\byte} or \num{{}e5}, which makes things look much nicer.

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\usepackage{siunitx}               % A better way of writing things with units
\sisetup{load-configurations = abbreviations, binary-units = true}
\DeclareSIUnit\px{px}

Another use for this package is for aligning numbers in a table, and we can directly use the table format S or S[table-format=3.2], see also Publication ready tables.

tikz

TikZ and PGF (Feuersänger et al., 2014) are packages for programatically creating figures, and deserve a longer writeup.

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\usepackage{tikz}

\usetikzlibrary{shapes, decorations, calc, arrows}
\usetikzlibrary{3d,fit,backgrounds, decorations.text}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning, shapes.symbols}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.pathreplacing, calligraphy}

\tikzset{>=latex}

TikZ figure example from a recent paper.

See more examples of TikZ figures on TeXample.net.

savetrees

Here is a controversial package. It really doesn’t belong on the recommended package list, but I will keep it here anyways. savetrees (Pakin, 2007) is magic. It is highly useful when you are approaching a conference deadline and you have one page over the conference limit. Using the subtle mode, we can preserve the document layout and try to make L^aT_eX pack text tighter.

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\usepackage[subtle]{savetrees}

Without savetrees.

With subtle savetrees.

With moderate savetrees.

With extreme savetrees.

Examples with various degrees of savetrees. The examples were compiled using pdfL^aT_eX from TeX Live 2019.

Conclusion

There are probably more top ten lists of L^aT_eX packages than there are packages, and here’s another one. Hope you enjoyed it!

What are your favorite packages? Comment below!

References

Cormode, G., Muthukrishnan, S., & Yan, J. (2012). Scienceography: The study of how science is written. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 7288 LNCS, 379–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30347-0_37
Scharrer, M. (2012). The adjustbox Package. CTAN, 1–29. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/adjustbox
Daly, P. W. (1999). Balancing the Two Columns of Text on the Last Page. 3–4. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/balance
Fear, S. (2020). Publication quality tables in LaTeX. 1–18. https://ctan.org/pkg/booktabs
Cubitt, T. (2012). The cleveref package. Sort, 1–28. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/cleveref
Talbot, N. L. C. (2016). User Manual for glossaries. 1–240.
Talbot, N. L. C. (2018). Glossaries-Extra : an Extension To the Glossaries Package. 1–201.
Schlicht, R. (2019). Microtype. 1–249. https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype
Khirevich, S. Tips on Writing a Thesis in LaTeX. Retrieved May 3, 2020, from http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/
Feuersänger, C. (2014). Manual for Plotting Package pgfplots. 1–500. https://ctan.org/pkg/pgfplots
Feuersänger, C., Menke, H., & Tantau, T. (2014). TikZ & PGF manual. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf
Wright, J. (2009). siunitx — A comprehensive ( SI ) units package. System, 1–60. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/siunitx
Pakin, S. (2007). The savetrees package. 1–25. https://www.ctan.org/pkg/savetrees

Suggested citation

If you would like to cite this work, here is a suggested citation in BibTeX format.

@misc{isaksson_2020,
  author="Isaksson, Martin",
  title={{Martin's blog --- Top 10 LaTeX packages for academic writing}},
  year=2020,
  url=https://blog.martisak.se/2020/05/03/top-ten-latex-packages/,
  note = "[Online; accessed 2024-10-03]"
}

Revisions

27 Jul 2023 - Change table-of-contents
25 Jul 2023 - Update Top-10 post.
14 Jun 2020 - Workaround for link with LaTeX in it
13 Jun 2020 - Change directory structure
13 Jun 2020 - Change references that pointed to other files
03 May 2020 - Add reference to glossaries-extra
03 May 2020 - Fix: Broken link
03 May 2020 - Fix: Repeated word in abstract
03 May 2020 - Add paper stack effect
03 May 2020 - Post: Top 10 LaTeX packages