Here are some ideas and tricks I found useful when working with latex.
include .pdf in your latex document or beamer
Have you ever considered reading in figures directly from pdf? No? Do it, it is really nice and if you present a paper, it prevents you from having thousands of small files with screenshots of the paper’s figures!
Here is how it works in latex beamer:
\begin{frame}{<Nameofyourframe>}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[page=1,clip, trim={50 100 50 130},width=\textwidth]{<pathtoyourpaper>/<yourpaper.pdf>}
\caption*{<yourcaption>}
\end{figure}
\end{frame}
notice that : ` trim={
To be even more convenient, put a frame around your image, so you see much better where the image boarders are (and where the white background of your latex file begins). Therefore, you can just
\frame{\includegraphics[page=1,clip, trim={50 100 50 130},width=\textwidth]{<pathtoyourpaper>/<yourpaper.pdf>}
Work with excel to make your latex tables
If I have large tables with long entries, I find it quite useful to first create it in an excel document. Once the table is finished, I create a new “latex-style” table with the excel function CONCATENATE witch does string concatenation, for example:
´´´
=CONCATENATE(B4, “ & “)
´´´
I also found this link https://www.tablesgenerator.com/markdown_tables where you can generate a markdown table. What I try to encourage you here is to program something alike yourself in excel.
The result looks like this:
before :
bla bla bla
bla bla bla
bla bla bla
bla bla bla
bla bla bla
bla bla bla
bla bla bla
after :
bla & bla & bla \\
bla & bla & bla \\
bla & bla & bla \\
bla & bla & bla \\
bla & bla & bla \\
bla & bla & bla \\
bla & bla & bla \\
very easy and handy.
Create figures in your latex beamer
Libre Office Impress or Power point are very handy for flowcharts or some other square-arrow shapes. To create those in latex beamer, I use the package TikZ: TikZ.
Creating a .bib file
The tedious thing about citing is usually the part of typing in the paper metadata. To prevent this, I usually research the paper I would like to cite either at the official website or in google scholar. There is a button for citing, where the BibTex formatted citation info can be copied out so you can directly paste it into your .bib file.
Here is an example for a Science paper:
