This is a collection of links and information on how to use LaTeX for your academic life at Berkeley, including making slides, conference posters, and theses.
These are a few online references for LaTeX that you may find useful. Some other things not given here (you can google to find them) are how to incorporate Matlab code in LaTeX (for printing) or how to use LaTeX for Matlab figure captions and axis titles.
BibTeX is a program that lets you maintain a “dictionary” of references. It's useful if you end up citing the same papers over and over again in multiple papers and also for sending bibliographies to other people. In addition, it makes applying bibliographic formatting rules a breeze by just changing the BibTeX style file. This is especially useful if you submit to non-IEEETrans publications and conferences.
Why would you want to write slides in LaTeX and not PowerPoint? One reason is robustness – PowerPoint presentations often run into font inclusion issues and others that a PDF presentation avoids. LaTeX-based presentations which are “formula-heavy” will get the benefic of LaTeX's much better formula writing and control. That being said, you have to handcode the slides, which can be made easier by using a macro package Three popular packages are:
beamer
package to ignore all overlay features (progressive reveals, etc.). The second adds the pgfpages
package (you may need to download this), and the third changes around the layout of the page. Clearly you can change the options as you see fit.\documentclass[handout]{beamer} \usepackage{pgf,pgfpages} \pgfpagesuselayout{4 on 1}[letterpaper,landscape,border shrink=0.5in]
Sometimes you may run into a situation where you have written a presenation using beamer but then have to convert it to PowerPoint. Prof. Anant Sahai has put together a hack for this. The pstoimg command is on most Unix systems, and a version probably exists for Windows as well.
pstoimg -antialias -aaliastext -density 400 -multi -out foo -type gif file.ps
Here is an early version of a LaTeX template for conference posters. The template is reasonably well-commented, and so it should be straightforward to build your own poster. Some options are not supported yet due to time constraints, so the template is a little barebones at the moment. Please direct any comments/bug reports, etc to Anand Sarwate (asarwate at eecs).
There are several thorny issues with image inclusion and allowable formats so please be sure to read the documentation. To use the template, you can download the archive:
The individual files in the archive are:
The Plan II Master's Thesis (report) doesn't have any particular formatting requirements. Niels Hoven (nhoven at eecs) has put together a nice LaTeX template that will allow you to drop in your existing BiBTeX entries.
The Graduate Division has a dissertation guide which is useful reading and contains all of the page specifications for the PhD thesis. There's also a page of links to information.
The archive below is modified from the Earth and Plantary Science Department template compiled by Matthew A. d'Alessio. It should contain all the files you will need. If you want to start from scratch, you can just download the ucthesis
package.