Way to remember LaTeX commands

Question

I'm new to LaTeX but have already read so much about it. Now, as I write my first long document, I notice that my head can't process all of this new information ;) For example creating a float - and I am like "Hmm what's the option that places a float at the bottom of the page? Or on its own page?"

What is your way for remembering these commands, especially if you only use them once in a while? Did you write your own short documentation or do you look up every question online?

My recipe: Training and buying a good book or reading some free introductory material like that from Dickimaw Books. — Thorsten Donig, Feb 16 '14 at 16:43
Most packages provide a pretty good documentation, which I open with texdoc <package>. For the LaTeX kernel, this is IMHO not the case, so I just google for it. I have basically stopped looking things up in books. — Daniel, Feb 16 '14 at 16:48
Almost all LaTeX command are mnemonics, the command to make a table of contents is \tableofcontents. How hard is that? ;-). Things i don't need often, i just look up in the documentation: texdoc latex2e (for example) in a terminal — Johannes_B, Feb 16 '14 at 17:06
You'll remember some of the basic and frequent ones soon by practice. For other commands, I look in my previous documents. I can't remember what the commands I used to do x were, but I usually remember in what paper I did x. So I just check there how I did it. — Sverre, Feb 16 '14 at 18:01
Because others mentioned something in this direction: What is the best book to start learning LaTeX? and LaTeX Introductions in languages other than English. — Speravir, Feb 17 '14 at 00:07
You could upload some of your documents in e.g. GitHub. Then, when you need to achieve something, that you remember have done once, open up your profile, look through you old work - and find how to do it! — Vorac, Feb 17 '14 at 12:25

Holene · Answer 1 · 2014-02-16T17:32:16.017

I use an editor (Sublime Text) where I can make snippets to expand into for instance floats (figures, tables) with my preferred setup.

For instance, typing "fig" and hitting tab expands to the following

\begin{figure}[htbp]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{}
    \caption{caption}
    \label{fig:label}
\end{figure}

This way I make my typing quite efficient, and it can help me to remember details in the coding.

But in general; the way you learn LaTeX is to write documents, check out solutions online (from for instance this brilliant community), and eventually all the small details will become very natural.

Way to remember LaTeX commands

1 Answers1