LaTeX

Attach references on arXiv.org

About one month ago I and my old colleague Jian Mei had published a paper about ornithology images on arXiv.org. But two days ago, Jian Mei found out that I have written the number of images and categories wrong.

To update the paper, I just packed my .tex and .bib files into a zip and uploaded this zip to arXiv.org to replace my old pdf. But strange things happened: all the references are lost.

Then I caught sight of the document. Since the arXiv.org only supports .bbl file instead of .bib, I need to compile the .bib to a .bbl file manually.

Could overleaf do it? Fortunately it could. Just upload the zip file and click the “Logs and output files” icon as below:

Then click the “Other logs & files” and choose “bbl file”. The bbl file will be downloaded. Finally, change the bbl file name to be the same with the .tex file (except the .bbl suffix) and pack them again to be a zip file.

This time, all references came back to the paper.

A convenient environment to write LaTex

More than one year ago, I wrote a paper about how to accelerate Deep Learning training for sparse features and dense features (images). For writing this paper, I installed a bunch of tools and plugins in my Mac-book and fixed a lot of errors for them by searching Google. Seems preparing LaTex environment on a local computer is really a pain in the neck.
Fortunately I found a convenient way today.
First, download your favourite template. For me the best template is CVPR-2020, from which anyone could download template. The template is a zip file.
Second, go to overleaf.com, sign up a new account. Then, in the top-left of the page, click “New Project”, and click “Upload Project”, choose the zip file above.
Third, now you would see a beautiful IDE for writing LaTex.

Enjoy!

How to writing papers with Markdown

Last weekend I exported my Jupyter Notebook records into a PDF format file. Surprisingly, the PDF file looks so good that I begin to think about using Jupyter Notebook or Markdown instead of LaTex to write technical papers because LaTex is an extremely powerful but inconvenient tool for writing. Then I created a file named ‘hello.md’:

# Head1
## First
There is a fox on the bank.
## Second
Hello

Then using a command line to convert the Markdown file to PDF (if you meet problems like ‘Can’t find *.sty’, just use ‘sudo tlmgr install xxx’):

pandoc -s -f markdown -t latex -o hello.pdf hello.md

The PDF file looks like:

It does works, but the appearance looks too rigid. Then I found the ‘pandoc-latex-template‘. By downloading and installing the ‘eisvogel.tex’, I can generate PDF by:

pandoc --template Downloads/eisvogel.tex -s -f markdown -t latex -o hello.pdf hello.md

And the new style looks as below:

Actually, we can use this template more heavily. Change ‘hello.md’ to:

---
title: "How to write technical papers"
author: [Robin Dong]
date: "2019-04-19"
keywords: [Markdown, pandoc]
lang: "en"
...
# How to write technical papers
## Install pandoc
Visit pandoc website
## Download template
Visit [pandoc-latex-template](github https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template/master/examples/basic-example/basic-example.md)
## Equation
\begin{equation}
    E = m c^2
\end{equation}
## Source code
```python
    import torch
    a = torch.zeros([2, 3])
    print(a) # This is not java
```

Add a file ‘metadata.yaml’ for font:

---
fontsize: 13pt
---

Then the command line:

pandoc --template Downloads/eisvogel.tex -s -f markdown -t latex -o hello.pdf hello.md metadata.yaml --highlight-style tango

The final document looks much more formal:

Some tips about LaTeX

1. After running ‘bibtex paper’, it reports

Too many commas in name 1 of "J.Chen, R.Monga, S.Bengio, R.Jozefowicz" for entry Revisit_SGD

This is because we need to use ‘and’ to replace commas. After changing them

# Change 'author = "J.Chen, R.Monga, S.Bengio, R.Jozefowicz"' to
author = "J.Chen and R.Monga and S.Bengio and R.Jozefowicz"

The errors disappeared.
2. How to extend space between two rows in a table?
Answer:

\begingroup
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{10pt} % Default value: 6pt
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.5} % Default value: 1
\begin{tabular}{ c c c }
First Row & -6 & -5 \\
Second Row & 4 & 10\\
Third Row & 20 & 30\\
Fourth Row & 100 & -30\\
\end{tabular}
\endgroup

3. Problem: Can’t upload .bib file in arXiv.org
Answer: run ‘pdflatex paper’ to generate paper.aux from paper.tex, and then run ‘bibtex paper’ to convert paper.bib to paper.bbl. Now we could upload .bbl file to arXiv.
4. Problem: When select ‘Tools’–>’Check Spelling…’ in texStudio, it report “No dictionary Available”.
Answer: Download english dictionary from https://extensions.openoffice.org/en/download/1471, change suffix from ‘oxt’ to ‘zip’ and unzip it. In ‘preferences’ of texStudio, set dictionary path to the unzip directory. (ref)
After solved all these problems, I eventually submit my paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.03925

Robin on Linux

LaTeX