The 2021 Outdex bingo

🕑 3 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 January 05, 2021 in Discussions • 🏷 fun allowed, LaTeX, Python

2020 hasn’t been particularly kind to most folks, although it did work out really well for my department here at Stony Brook (more on that in some other post, perhaps). 2021 still has that “new car” smell, but it might need some help to stay fresh for the full 52 weeks. This is why I present you with my revolutionary invention: Outdex bingo.


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Phonetic vowel charts in LaTeX

🕑 12 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 August 26, 2020 in Tutorials • 🏷 student advice, LaTeX, phonetics

It’s nice to have loyal readers. One of them wrote me an email a few days ago that starts as follows:

Hi, hope all is well with you. I notice Outdex has been silent for longer than usual but I prefer to assume that that is because you are doing something more fun.

Guilty as charged. In anticipation of my 1-year sabbatical (*gloat*), I have used this summer for an extended vacation from everything linguistics and academia. Well, not quite, there was something fun I did that is sort of related to linguistics, but more on that in an upcoming post. Anyway, this loyal reader knows how to reel me back in: a LaTeX question! More precisely, the best way to typeset a vowel chart in tikz, which is the standard solution for graphics in LaTeX nowadays. Challenge accepted.


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LaTeX pet peeves

🕑 12 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 July 07, 2020 in Tutorials • 🏷 student advice, LaTeX

Somehow I wound up with five students writing their theses this Spring semester, and you know what this means: lots and lots of reading. And when reading, I can’t help but get riled up every time I see one of my LaTeX pet peeves. I also like to read the source files in parallel with the PDF, and over the years I’ve come across some nightmare-fuel coding in those files.

So, in a (futile?) attempt to save my future self’s sanity, here’s a list of all my LaTeX pet peeves. Many of them are covered in your average LaTeX tutorial, but people rarely read those cover to cover and instead just go to specific parts that they need to solve whatever problem they’re wrestling with. Compiling it all into a single list might make for a more useful reference. Future students of mine, read this and adhere to it. You have been warned!


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