LaTeX

Some general resources are:

• The Overleaf documention has some user-friendly LaTeX documentation that also helps you get started using Overleaf.
  • For people new to LaTeX, they have a decent 30 minute introduction to LaTeX.
  • As a uWaterloo graduate student you get access to the professional version of Overleaf, which has version control. It's a great way to collaborate on tex documents without the hassle of conflicted copies.
  • The uWaterloo thesis template is available!
• The Wikibook has a lot of useful information.

Comparing two LaTeX files

The LaTeX-diff tool provides a great way to visually compare two LaTeX files. This can be very useful if you're trying to compare two versions of a paper to find the changes.

Overleaf also has some useful documentation on the subject.

Removing URLs etc. from Bibliography

If you maintain your .bib file through Mendeley or some other program, you may find that when you call cite, citep, citet that the bibliography contains all sorts of unwanted content, such as lengthy URLs. One option to remove these is to remove all of the URLs from your .bib file, but that can be cumbersome (particularly if you maintain a large .bib).

Another option to remove these is to modify the appropriate .bst file to ignore them. For example, if you use natbib (a popular and very nice package for bibliographies) with the style plainnat, then you would need to modify plainnat.bst (can be locate on a nix machine by calling locate plainnat.bst).

Within the .bst file, you'll find sections that look like:

FUNCTION {format.url}
{ url empty$
    { "" }
    { new.block "URL \url{" url * "}" * }
  if$
}

Replace the highlighted line with { "" } to set it to ignore URLs by default.

If you don't want to over-write the default, you can copy plainnat.bst as plainnatnourl.bst, make the appropriate changes, and then select plainnatnourl as your bibliography style in your .tex file.