Blog
LaTeX notes for researchers and students
Field-specific writing advice, thesis structure, Git for papers, privacy, and local-first tooling. Also available as an RSS feed.
Converting a PDF to LaTeX without uploading it anywhere
Most PDF to LaTeX converters run on someone else's server. Here is how deterministic, local conversion works, what it can and cannot recover, and when AI actually helps.
Local-first vs cloud LaTeX editors: what you actually trade
Cloud LaTeX editors trade ownership for convenience. A look at what local-first changes in practice: privacy, speed, offline work, and what happens when a service disappears.
Stop missing conference deadlines: AoE, abstracts, and countdowns
Why conference deadlines are confusing (AoE timezones, separate abstract dates), how the open ccf-deadlines dataset fixes discovery, and how to keep a live countdown next to your manuscript.
Clinical and grant writing: privacy, trackable drafts, and offline LaTeX
Why medical, public-health, and grant writers care where the draft is stored, and how local-first LaTeX fits review cycles.
Mathematics students: theorems, proofs, and notation that stays consistent
amsthm styles, lemma numbering, and macro hygiene for pure and applied math writeups.
Git for research papers: what actually works with coauthors
Branching, who owns which chapter, what to ignore, and why PDF binaries should not dominate the repo.
Research diagrams in TikZ when PowerPoint will not cut it
When to draw pipelines, automata, and commutative diagrams in TeX so they recolor for the journal and stay sharp in print.
Humanities and long-form: biblatex, footnotes, and chapter books
For history, literature, philosophy, and classics students who need footnotes, flexible citations, and multi-chapter projects.
Your first lab report in LaTeX as an undergrad
A short path from zero to a compiling report: template, equations, figures, references, without installing a full TeX distribution by hand.
Structure a graduate thesis in LaTeX before the panic sets in
Front matter, chapter includes, acronyms, and committee templates: a checklist for Master's and PhD students.
Engineering students: IEEE and ACM templates without the weekend of pain
How to start from the real class file, not a random Overleaf clone, and what usually breaks in two-column camera-ready.
Economics and social science: regression tables that journals accept
booktabs, threeparttable, notes under estimates, and biblatex habits for econ, poli-sci, and sociology students.
Biology and life-science papers: figures, multi-panel plates, and coauthors
Practical LaTeX for wet-lab and computational biology: multi-panel figures, supplements, and collaboration without overwriting each other.
Chemistry papers in LaTeX: formulas, schemes, and SI units
How chemistry and chemical-engineering students typeset reactions, structures, and experimental sections without fighting the compiler.
Physics theses: equations, units, and multi-file sanity
Practical LaTeX habits for physics and astronomy students: notation, siunitx, multi-chapter projects, and journals that still want two columns.
LaTeX for machine learning papers without the notation mess
How ML students keep experiments, ablations, and math notation consistent from first arXiv draft to camera-ready.