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I have been basically "hacking" with LaTeX so far, trying out things that seem to visually give the result I want, and using google to find solutions.

However, I have heard people say that certain LaTeX usage is bad (e.g. using : instead of \colon in certain places), and that certain packages are canonical (e.g. amsmath).

Other questions have asked about an ad hoc list of best practices, or about the LaTeX language specification, but my question is: Are there LaTeX usage standards that are basically accepted by the mainstream researcher community (and in particular, journals and conferences) as "the correct" way to use LaTeX, and that are organized into a single resource? I don't expect literally all usage standards to be in there, since different fields might have different expectations or customs. One candidate I found is the Math into Latex book by Gratzer.

user56834
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    Short answer: no. There are things more users would agree on, and some which less users find acceptable. –  May 01 '20 at 06:22
  • There are basically accepted deprecated usages (see here) but d don't be surprised to find them in journal and conference templates. – Fran May 01 '20 at 09:05
  • Why do you want to know? Do you worry that a journal or conference might reject your (camera-ready) submission because you didn't follow standards? In that case: there are people with the task of sanitizing submissions, either in the LaTeX source or in postprocessing, so non-standard tricks will be filtered out there. Or are you generally just interested in 'clean' coding? In that case using LaTeX in general will give you a hard time :) – Marijn May 01 '20 at 14:04
  • The only thing I think most people might agree on is things that shouldn't be done. I'm collecting examples, and hope to write up an overview. (In my copious free time.) – barbara beeton May 01 '20 at 16:07
  • Also, correct usage for one journal is not the same as correct usage for another. One general hint: If they have gone to some effort to prevent you from doing something, don't do it. – John Kormylo May 01 '20 at 16:07
  • @Marijn, "In that case: there are people with the task of sanitizing submissions, either in the LaTeX source or in postprocessing" Do you mean people working at the journal, or people one can hire? – user56834 May 02 '20 at 14:44
  • @user56834 people working at the journal. – Marijn May 02 '20 at 15:54

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