What is this?

This website collects a number of tips and pointers on how to write nice looking, readable, correct mathematical texts.

This is not a tutorial on LaTeX. There is a large number of introductory guides to LaTeX available on the web; see for instance Håvard Berland's introduction (in Norwegian), the LaTeX Wikibook or the LaTeX Primer

Who is this for?

This was written for bachelor and master students writing their thesis.

Why should you care?

There are many good reasons for writing clearly and correctly, but the two most important reasons are purely pragmatic: To get better feedback on your manuscript, and to get a better grade from your thesis examiner.

Imagine you are handing your supervisor a dense mathematical text which is full of syntactic mistakes and incorrect whitespace usage. Instead of spending their time giving feedback on what you have been doing, they spend most of their time correcting mistakes you could have fixed yourself. Likewise, the thesis examiner will be distracted, annoyed and confused by spelling errors, illogical sectioning and jumbled equations. As a consequence, you are likely to get a worse grade than you could have gotten.

I disagree with your advice

Most of the advice on this website are generally agreed upon among typographers, mathematicians and/or TeXers. Of course, you are free to break any of these rules, but if you do you should understand the rule, and be concious about why you disagree with it.

If you are convinced that any of the advice on this website is decidedly wrong, then please don't hesitate to send me an e-mail.

Further writing aides

There is a wealth of great tools and sources of information online. Here are some of my favourites:

• The TeX FAQ.
• Detexify – a tool which lets you draw a symbol and then searches for matching TeX symbols.
• Ordnett (for Norwegians) – a great dictionary. Available for free if you log in with your university credentials.
• A thesaurus, such as thesaurus.com, to help you expand your vocabulary.
• Is it twenty-eight or twenty eight? Cookbook or cook book? The Chicago Manual of Style’s hyphenation table will help you out.