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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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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Even though I’m slowly growing into my role as tenured professor, I still haven’t developed a taste for saying the same thing over and over again — at least not when I’m aware it’s the same thing over and over again. One thing that comes up a lot is questions by new students about their presentations, be it in class or at a conference. So I figured I might actually be able to save everybody some time by just posting my standard remarks on the Outdex, preserved for eternity. Who knows, it might even be hilarious 30 years from now to read about how we did things in the academic stone age. Just like it’s hard to talk about mimeographs nowadays without a smirk on your face.

Okay, then let’s tackle the very first issue, one that is still so contentious in some parts of the field that it might rip asunder the fabric of space and time: slides or handouts?

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