Now that I have spent over 20 hours editing people’s papers on ShareLatex, I will sum up the most common mistakes being made.

PLEASE PAY ATTENTION!

Subscripts and Superscripts

This is a common one. To include more than one character in a super or subscript, you simply put those characters between curly brackets.

This: f_s_u_b should be f_{sub}.

This: f^s^u^p should be f^{sup}

Inline Math

Math equations in text should be surrounded by dollar signs. For example: “The equation $f = ma$”

Compiling Errors

This is the biggest one and most important. You all need to use this. People seem to ignore a big read number next to the compile button:

This means there is a problem in your Latex. Click on that number and it will list the line number and possible problem:

In this case we misspelled the word equation as equation2.

When your Latex is compiling fine, you will see a number in orange. This means you are good to go! This is what it looks like when things are compiling correctly:

Bibliography Change

Some of you may have noticed that I have changed the bibliography format. That is because the current format although very convenient, doesn’t work the way we want when putting together the proceedings book. I spent about 40 hours writing Latex computer code in order to make our system work for us in the format we like. But since Latex is a very primitive and esoteric language, I don’t dominate it so I did the best I could.

In order for the bibliographies to stay at the end of each paper, I had to change it to an older system. I have done that for most of your papers. If not, I will have to do it. Here is the new format that goes at the bottom. It is less elegant but it works for our proceedings system so that the proceedings is automatically generated.

Two important changes:

1. Everything in this list will appear in the paper. The other system gathered all the \cites from the paper and created only those used. This is different. Every item appears
2. Order must match the order of your \cite commands. If you put on in the middle, you need to place it in the proper order in the bibliography.

This is not as “nice” but it is best for us to streamline the process in creating the entire book. We appreciate everyone’s patience and cooperation on this.