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I am writing a lot of documents mostly with mathematics in them.

I personally leave 1cm space between sections/subsections etc and the text below them and a 0.7cm space between text and math formulae. Also an 0.3cm space between paragraphs. I have adjusted these values only because I like the output.

There are a lot more customizations that I use for example I always use \displaystyle (although there are a lot of you that have warned me against it and I believe that there is a good reason for it, but I really like it), also I don't want to mix text and math so I generally place math in a new line (with a space of 0.7cm as I said).

Sometimes I make up my mind and I change the spaces I use or some of the other customizations...

So I would like to ask all of you writing documents (books included) is there any special way or special rules that someone must follow for the size of the formulae or the spaces or generally for the output? Are you following any guidelines? When someone is being given a manuscript to typeset does he do whatever he likes based on the output or is he following some rules?

For instanse when I want to write different sentences I leave a space of 0.3cm as you can see:

enter image description here

Adam
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  • Without seeing a representative sample of your mathematical writing, I don't think it's possible to give meaningful advice. So far, we don't know anything about the font you use, the font size, the line spacing, the width and height of the text block, the prevalence of items such as sectioning headers, the average length of displayed equations, the prevalence of large math operators (caused by \displaystyle) inside paragraphs, and so on. You need to provide some information on these subjects to give anyone a chance to judge, say, whether 0.7cm vertical spacing around equations is OK. – Mico Oct 20 '14 at 05:31
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    I suggest using just basic LaTeX with NO special formatting whatsoever. The thing is that you can customise as much as you like but when you publish it then the journal will make it conform to their style, undoing all of your much loved personal settings. Ultimately, it is a waste of time to worry about these things. –  Oct 20 '14 at 05:33
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    Your question is complex and difficult to answer categorically in a few lines.

    First your question implies a not very common orthotypographical domain in mathematics. I don't remember seeing many books about it, I know of one that can come in handy and help dispel doubts just I don't remember the title name right now. You'll have to wait until tomorrow I can go to the library and see.

    Secondly, your question has to do with style conventions that may vary from country to country, or from language to language, not to mention from publisher to publisher.

     – Aradnix Oct 20 '14 at 05:45
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    My suggestion: if it works do not fix it. TeX was created by someone with a pretty good typographic culture, although it is not perfect, he was careful to take care of the proportions between the different elements that compose it refers to mathematics rather than precise dimensions in these items. – Aradnix Oct 20 '14 at 05:46
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    There should be no explicit spacing within the document, the layout decisions of the type you mention should be specified in the document class and therefore be easily changed when changing document class (eg to submit to a journal using a specific design). LaTeX documents with explicit spacing are far less useful (and often need to be completely re-keyed if submitted fro publication) – David Carlisle Oct 20 '14 at 08:27
  • See here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/32012/215 – Seamus Oct 20 '14 at 08:39
  • Thank you for your enlightening comments! One thing that I don't understand when you say to not to use formatting is: when I want to write a big formula below text how can I specify the space between them? This is just the first thing that came to mind... – Adam Oct 20 '14 at 11:16
  • @Mico I have not a specific document in mind, I just wondering when someone is about to write one begins customizing as he likes or he has some guidelines say fonts, spaces, size etc...Also generally I don't only mean to write a document for publication in a journal. – Adam Oct 20 '14 at 11:18
  • @Adam why do you want to specify the space between the text and the formula (TeX has a parameter \abovedisplayskip which sets this length but you never need to set it on a per-document basis, it should be set in the document class as part of the overall design) – David Carlisle Oct 21 '14 at 00:18
  • @DavidCarlisle you are right there. But a better example is for instance the space between two sentences. There are a lot of times that I write a sentence and then below I want to write a new one like a theorem. What space do I leave? Currentry I leave 0.3cm. – Adam Oct 21 '14 at 00:22
  • @Adam No!!!! If you want to state a theorem use \begin{theorem} $P=NP$\end{theorem} the spacing around theorems is an aspect of the document design and should not be anywhere near the actual document text. – David Carlisle Oct 21 '14 at 00:37
  • @DavidCarlisle I don't think that I express myself correctly. I will edit my question with a screenshot of what I mean with space between sentences. – Adam Oct 21 '14 at 01:06
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    well again that is just zero parindent and non zero parskip, I hope you are not adding space explicitly between the paragraphs with \vspace etc? the paragraph space should be set globally (or in the definition of an environment) – David Carlisle Oct 21 '14 at 01:19
  • @DavidCarlisle I add it with \vspace what is the right way? I mean is this even considered a paragraph? It is just a simple sentence... – Adam Oct 21 '14 at 01:19
  • Just leave a blank line – David Carlisle Oct 21 '14 at 01:20
  • @DavidCarlisle you mention non zero parskip. From what I understand is that this is to achieve the 0.3cm between the paragraphs that I want. When can I set that? – Adam Oct 21 '14 at 01:24
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    in the preamble before \begin{document \setlength\parindent{0pt} \setlength\parskip{0.3cm plus .1cm} (best allow some stretch) but better use something like parskip package which lets you do this without messing up "hidden" paragraphs in section heads etc – David Carlisle Oct 21 '14 at 01:27
  • @DavidCarlisle thank you very much I really appreciate it! Up to this point I was confused but now I get what you mean. I will try and get back to you! – Adam Oct 21 '14 at 01:30

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Quite a bit of guidance is provided by Mathematics into Type, by Ellen Swanson and published by the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/arc/styleguide/mit-2.pdf

There is also some information in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Those are both American references. I assume the ISO-80000-2 standard is preferred in Europe. You can find a list a references related to the ISO standard at the end of isomath.pdf, which is the documentation for that package and should be included in your Latex distribution if you use Texlive or one of its derivatives. On my system, I found it at (installation-dir)/texmf-dist/doc/latex/isomath/isomath.pdf.

barbara beeton
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dedded
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  • This is one of the rare cases where I think ISO goofed. There are pretty much useless claims in those standards that nobody uses. And also it is a matter of taste so these sources are just pushing one type of notation to everyone as writings on the stone. – percusse Oct 20 '14 at 20:27