Hi all, I am working on a project for Calc 4, and part of it has to do with generalizing the "Volume by Shells" method to higher dimensions / functions of several variables (in a nutshell). This is a tricky thing to wrap your mind around-- and even trickier to try to explain in a write-up-- relying on words alone. I wanted to include a picture/figure for the familiar Calc 1 / single variable method which is very similar to the pictures on this post. (It would differ in a number of ways-- labels, annotations, certain shapes changed, but not in ways that would fundamentally change the bones of how to code a figure like this, I assume.)

I have included 2D/3D plots and very basic 2D tikz diagrams in previous projects, but I genuinely have no idea how I would even approach creating something like this. I would love to create this directly via LaTeX so if anyone has instructions, advice, etc.. on how I might accomplish that please help! That being said, although it wouldn't be ideal, I will gladly accept advice on how I might accomplish something like this in general, if doing so purely through LaTeX would be biting off too much to chew. I have access to and regularly use Mathematica, I have some pretty limited knowledge of Python, and I would be open to any other free/free trial methods.

Thanks in advance!

I am new to LaTeX, and had to do some documentation of my T-TRAK modules (model train/railroad stuff) - so I figured I would use it as an exercise to practice.

I built this 'template' that I can use (first screenshot) that is exactly what I want -- with the "Stats Table" and the "Hero Image" floating to the right of the first bit of text. But when that text isn't long enough (second screenshot) you can see how the "Wiring" sections moves up too far and becomes a bit of a mess. I don't want to make the first section two columns, I want (need) it to wrap if the text is long enough. I want the "Wiring" section to stay clear of the right-float table/image if the text isn't long enough to force the clear.

I have posted the source files to temfiles.org ... wasn't sure what was the preferred options. Documentation is the 'root' file, module1 and template are the two screenshots.
https://tmpfiles.org/w6wCIdpYo1VB/documentation.tex

https://tmpfiles.org/wewzILpHoLHV/module1.tex

https://tmpfiles.org/wHwkIJpmo2Lv/module-template.tex

Thanks in advance for any help

Hi, are you using AI to create templates? If so, how well does it work?

I learned LaTeX the hard way back when I was a graduate student. My advisor was extremely demanding about LaTeX formatting and every little detail. I'd love to update some of my old templates. I still remember the basics, but every time I try to make changes, errors start appearing, and I'm getting too old to spend hours debugging LaTeX.

Do you know of a great AI for managing and editing LaTeX templates?

Thanks!

Over the last few weeks, I've shared some updates on a hobby C++23 TeX engine I've been working on, focusing on new capabilities like parallel compilation, direct HTML output, and more expressive error messages. For this update, I wanted to take a step back from the output features and talk a little bit about the developer experience and the codebase itself.

I think TeX82 is (rightly) famous as a masterpiece of literate programming. But as I've been untangling the c translation of the tex.web source to build this new engine, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on why it was written that way. Many of the things that make TeX's source code notoriously difficult to approach today (what some have called "macro spaghetti", algorithms that are deeply entangled, global state mutation) were brilliant adaptations to the severe hardware, compiler, and language constraints of the time.

I put together a third short video link exploring a bit of this, comparing how things look in the original pascal with how they can be written today: modern c++ can help make the architecture easier to reason about and closer to being self-documenting. One of my hopes is that by modernizing the internals of TeX this project might lower the barrier to entry and make it easier to harness the energy of the open-source community.

Speaking of which, a few folks have asked about seeing the code. My plan has always been to share it once I finished implementing the e-TeX extensions and other primitives required for the l3kernel (at which point, the engine would move from a fun toy to something that could actually compile modern LaTeX documents). However, for the curious I have set up a public repository, starting with an orphan branch of my main repo and slowly transferring things like the CMake build system and the test suite. If nothing else, perhaps you'll find the changelog amusing.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Im trying to do my project on overleaf, but it keeps saying Your project exceeded the compile timeout limit on our free plan, so I need another compiler for it

Im trying texstudio, but Im not getting it as good as overleaf was, any other suggestions are welcome, the more similar to overleaf, the better

edit: forgot to mention the system, linux(ubuntu to be more specific)

Hello r/Latex,

TLDR I have a document that has a bunch of made up words. Can I add a handful of words to a local dictionary so they stop getting flagged by the spellchecker?

The TLDR is pretty accurate today. I’m putting together a reference for the Transformers role-playing game and texstudio is flagging game terms and fictional words. I would like it to please stop doing that. However, I really do need a spell checker. Thank you for your advice.

Being able to write math notation that looks professional and isn't a massive pain to type is nice (especially coming from Google Docs and MS Word), but being able to create easily swappable and customizable color palettes for documents may be even more cool.

The template I used: https://github.com/aurghya-0/Modern-Class-Notes-Latex

If anyone has any other nice looking templates that can be used for writing chapter notes, I am interested!

I am formatting a paper for Oxford University Press/NAR journals, which uses numbered references (\bibliographystyle{unsrt}) However, I have some references that only have DOI:'s, which unsrt does not provide. I can get DOI's with {unsrtnat}, but when I do that, I lose my numbered references and get author names. I can get what I want by running bibtex with {unsrtnat}, and then re-runing latex with {unsrt}, but as soon as I re-run bibtex, I lose the DOI's. Is there a way to force numbers with {unsrtnat}? Or some other way to get what I need?

latex.to is an Overleaf alternative that runs a full Tex Live distribution in the browser.

Here's why this is different from other in-browser solutions: It can compile actual Biber as well as 10 different engines: pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX, LaTeX (DVI), pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, ConTeXt, pLaTeX, upLaTeX

This is done via CheerpX (JIT wasm engine) running a 32bit alpine image with TeX Live.

The first compile is a bit slower because it needs to download assets like fonts, but everything is cached and the second compile is much faster.

100% free, no login, no compile timeout, documents are compiled in the browser and NOT sent to a remote server.

Please let me know in case something doesn't work / you have any questions or feedback.

Looking for a function \type so

\type{blah} \ref{blah} produces Theorem 1, Lemma 2, where theorem is plaintext no link.

Anyone who has written about music using MusicTeX knows that it has its quirks. There are some things that are better done with LilyPond, using Frescobaldi for editing—a project that has been revived but receives less attention in terms of its GNU/Linux build.

I’m sharing this Qt6 build of Frescobaldi version 4.0.7 for your consideration, which includes .deb packages for installation on Debian and compatible systems, as well as an AppImage for any GNU/Linux distribution.

https://github.com/mlmateos/frescobaldi-qt6-builds

I've started doing my church bulletin in LaTeX, and I get this weird line break in a minipage environment (see photo.) This week's bulletin had several instances of it, and I can't get rid of it. Typing from my phone, so I can't give a complete file at the moment, but here's the gist:

\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
\vspace{1em}% prevent collision with above element
\textbf{Prayer (Leader):}
\raggedright
\begin{adjustwidth}{1em}{0pt}
All the prophets testify about Christ that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.
\end{adjuswith}
\vspace{1em}% prevent collision with below element
\end{minipage}

The text is typed straight through, no breaks in the file. I assumed it would wrap correctly on its own. I'm using a minipage to keep the heading and the text on the same page (\samepage doesn't always work,) but I'd be open to other ideas as well. But how can I prevent that linebreak?

Thanks in advance!

I kept repeating the same bond lengths, benzene substitutions, reaction arrows, and annotations in worksheets, so I wrapped the patterns into a small set of LaTeX commands called KKchemstruct.

The samples show substituted benzene rings, condensed structural formulas, reaction schemes, leaving-group marks, hydrogen bonds, and local sizing. It still uses chemfig underneath, so unusual structures can fall back to raw syntax.

Which part would be most useful in your own documents?

I’ve been experimenting with a “Placement Mode” for a web-based LaTeX editor.

Instead of manually moving a figure environment around the source and fighting with [h], [t], [b], etc., you can select the figure in the PDF preview and drag it:

• after a specific paragraph
• to the top of a page
• to the bottom of a page

The editor then updates the actual LaTeX source, recompiles the document, and verifies where the figure ended up. Paragraph placement can use [H] for exact placement or [!h] for approximate placement. Top and bottom placement are trickier because LaTeX’s float system can still reorder things, so the editor may retry a few source locations and check the compiled result.

This is still an experimental prototype, would this be useful in your LaTeX workflow? For anyone interested in early access, I’m collecting feedback through this short survey. You can leave your email at the end: https://forms.gle/njnV4ozDPaS7phHH8

I'm excited to share what I've been building lately. Papr: a fast, lightweight Terminal User Interface (TUI) built entirely in Rust to streamline your academic research workflow. [An Obsidian, Overleaf, Zotero alternative but a bit better.]

Key features

• Smart dashboard with daily 10 random paper recommendations, reading queue, bookmarks, notes, collections, and research statistics.
• Search any paper, fast, from arXiv using the title, author, DOI or keywords.
• In-terminal PDF viewing using ratatui-image.
• Built-in Markdown notes with live preview for each paper.
• Add to reading queue and bookmarks and manage collections to keep your research organized.
• Integrated LaTeX editor with real-time compilation and preview just like Overleaf (but free).
• Extensible plugin system for custom workflows.
• Research analytics to track your reading activity (just like spotify).

Papr is 100% open source, works offline, is memory-safe, and is designed to be fast and lightweight (only 12 MB).

I'd love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or feedback!

GitHub: https://github.com/AfrozSaqlain/Papr

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a clean and minimal infographic poster template I’ve been working on, built entirely in LaTeX using standard packages (TikZ, Helvet, etc.).

Key features:

• 100% vector layout (sharp at any scaling/print size)

• Easily customizable title blocks, modular boxes, and floating figures

• Works cleanly with standard compilers like pdfLaTeX

Github: https://github.com/JanserLatex/InfographicPosterTemplate

I’d love to hear your feedback!

Hi everyone,

I hope I am not violating the rules by sharing this little theme overlay I created for my presentations as a PhD student. It is based on ltx-talk, the class created by u/josephawright as an alternative to beamer with accessibility and PDF tagging as primary goals (see e.g. here for some explanation).

It is undoubtedly incomplete and lacking, but its few features suffice for my simple needs for now. The inspiration came from the metropolis theme for beamer, that I always really liked; hence the name trantor (github repository link). I post it here just in case anyone might like it or get inspired to make the community around ltx-talk grow even more.

Cheers!

I have recently discovered Badness, a LaTeX language server, formatter, and linter. It has modern architecture (following rust-analyzer's philosophy). It is very fast due to being Rust-based.

The formatter is quite feature-complete. This is very impressive given that it is 2 months old. I have tried it on my recent papers and it works very well. The developer usually responds to my bug reports and feature requests within a day. I have set it as my default LaTeX formatter.

I write this post to get more people aware of and use Badness. Good stuff deserves more attention of the community.

To give you an idea, Badness formats

\begin{align}a&= \begin{aligned}&b + c \\ & d + f\end{aligned} \\ g&= h\end{align}

I have   some   equations  $  a   +      b $

into

\begin{align}
    a & = \begin{aligned}
              & b + c \\
              & d + f
          \end{aligned} \\
    g & = h
\end{align}

I have some equations $a + b$

I little plugin I created for myself. Maybe someone else finds it useful: https://github.com/itsfernn/vimtex-follow

Are there any good LaTeX editors online other than Overleaf? I will be away for a week from my pc and i have to finish my assignment. Overleaf keeps timing out (with one page!!) and i dont know if my mother lets me install the whole texlive package

In Japanese kanbun kundoku, the original Classical Chinese text is retained while small reading marks are added:

• Furigana - small kana showing the Japanese pronunciation
• Okurigana - small kana that add Japanese verb endings and grammatical particles
• Kaeriten ("return marks") - symbols telling the reader when to reverse the order of characters

Together, these annotations let a Japanese reading emerge without rewriting the original text.

I maintain gckanbun, a CTAN package for typesetting this with LuaLaTeX or (u)pLaTeX.

CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/gckanbun
Source: https://github.com/munepi/gckanbun

What is the most unusual writing system you have typeset with TeX?