TeX tips for linguists

I’ve been using TeX to write linguistics papers for nearly a decade now. I still think it’s the best option. Since TeX is a big, complex ecosystem and not at all designed with linguists in mind, I thought it might be helpful to describe the tools and workflow I use to produce my papers, handouts, and abstracts.

Michael Becker‘s notes are recommended as well.

Software

I use xetex (this is the same as xelatex) from XeTeX. It has two advantages over the traditional pdflatex and related tools. First, you can use system fonts via fontspec and mathspec. If you are using Computer Modern or packages like txfonts or times, etc., it’s time to join the modern world.

Secondly, it expects UTF-8. If you are using tipa, or multi-character sequences to enter non-ASCII characters, then you probably have ugly transcriptions. (Don’t want to name names…)

Fonts

Linguists generally demand the following types of characters:

  • Alphabetic small caps
  • The complete IPA, especially IPA [g] (which is not English “g”)
  • “European” extensions to ASCII: enye (año), diaresis (coöperation, über), acute (résumé), grave (à), macron (māl), circumflex (être), haček (očudit), ogonek (Pająk), eth (fracoð), thorn (þæt), eszet (Straße), cedilla (açai), dotted g (ealneġ), and so on, for Roman-like writing systems

The only font I’ve found that has all this is Linux Libertine. It has nothing to do with Linux, per se. In general, it’s pretty handsome, especially when printed small (though the Q is ridiculously large). If you can deal without small caps (and arguably, linguists use them too much), then a recent version of Times New Roman (IPA characters were added recently) also fits the bill. Unfortunately, if you’re on Linux and using the “MS Core Fonts”, that version of Times New Roman doesn’t have the IPA characters.

This is real important: do not allow your mathematical characters to be in Computer Modern if your paper is not in Computer Modern. It sticks out like a sore thumb. What you do is put something like this in the preamble:

\usepackage{mathspec}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Times New Roman}
\setmathfont(Digits,Greek,Latin){Times New Roman}

Examples

The gb4e package seems to be the best one for syntax-style examples, with morph-by-morph glossing and the like. I myself deal mostly in phonology, so I use the tabular environment wrapped with an example environment of my own creation called simplex.sty and packaged in my own LingTeX (which is a work-in-progress).

Bibliographies

I use natbib. When I have a choice, I usually reach for pwpl.bst, the bibliography style that we use for the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. It’s loosely based on the Linguistic Inquiry style.

Compiling

I use make for compiling. This will be installed on most Linux computers. On Macintoshes, you can get it as part of the Developer Tools package, or with Xcode.

I type make to compile, make bib to refresh the bibliography, and make clean to remove all the temporary files. Here’s what a standard Makefile for paper.tex would look like for me.

 # commands
 PDFTEX=xelatex -halt-on-error
 BIBTEX=bibtex

 # files
 NAME=paper

 all: $(NAME).pdf

 $(NAME).pdf: $(NAME).tex $(NAME).bib *.pdf
      $(PDFTEX) $(NAME).tex
      $(BIBTEX) $(NAME).tex
      $(PDFTEX) -interaction=batchmode -no-pdf $(NAME).tex
      $(PDFTEX) -interaction=batchmode $(NAME).tex

 clean:
      latexmk -c

There are a couple interesting things here. -halt-on-error kills a compile the second it goes bad: why wouldn’t you want to fix the problem right when it’s detected, since it won’t produce a full PDF anyways? Both -interaction=batchmode and -no-pdf shave off a considerable amount of compile time, but aren’t practical when debugging, and when producing a final PDF, respectively. I use latexmk -c, which reads the log files and removes temporary files but preserves the target PDF. For some reason, though, it doesn’t remove .bbl files.

Draft mode

Up until you’re done, start your file like so:

\documentclass[draft,12pt]{article}

This will do two things: “overfull hboxes” will be marked with a black line, so you can rewrite and fix them. Secondly, images won’t be rendered into the PDF, which saves time. It’s very easy to tell who does this and who doesn’t.

On slides and posters

There are several TeX-based tools for making slides and posters. Beamer seems to be very popular for slides, but I find the default settings very ugly (gradients!) and cluttered (navigation buttons on every slide!). I use a very minimal Keynote style (Helvetica Neue, black on white). I’m becoming a bigger fan of handouts, since unlike slides or posters, the lengthy process of making a handout gets me so much closer to publication.