My LaTeX workflow - from Google Docs to PDF

As much as I enjoy writing my academic work in LaTeX, it had a steep learning curve and took a significant time to set up all my tools to work conveniently with it.

Cloud

One of my requirements was to be able to edit my documents anywhere and potentially collaborate with others on them. While Overleaf is an excellent tool, it's not a great platform to write long texts in, and the collaboration features are somewhat limited compared to Google Doc.
Google Doc was missing LaTeX syntax highlights, so I created a plugin to do exactly that.

Tables

Everyone who's using LaTeX agrees that editing tables is as painful as it can get. I like storing my data in Google Sheets, so I created a plugin that converts from Google Sheets to LaTex.

Reference management

I chose Zotero with Better Bibtex for managing my references, which is a great toolset, but I ran into the problem several times: author names across papers were slightly misspelled, and it caused rendering artefacts when creating the references section in my document. To fix this, I created a plugin that detects duplicate authors in Zotero and highlights the ones that are potentially the same with slightly different spelling, so I can manually fix them.

Creating the PDF locally

Finally, I needed to download from Google Docs and generate the final PDF locally - copy-pasting was inconvenient, so I created a tool that can download a Google Doc (with all changes accepted) locally, so I can render the final PDF.

Overall workflow

It might be a bit hard to follow it in text, so here is my full workflow:

G cluster_cloud Cloud cluster_gd Google Doc cluster_gs Google Sheet cluster_localinstall Local installation cluster_zotero Zotero gd Google Docs gdownload gdocs-download gd->gdownload gs Google Sheet gs->gd lm latexmk pdf .pdf output lm->pdf tex .tex tex->lm bib .bib bib->lm zot Zotero app zot->bib zbb Better bibtex (plugin) zbb->zot zdd detect-duplicate-authors (plugin) zdd->zot gdownload->tex gdhighlight gdocs-latex-syntax-highlight (plugin) gdhighlight->gd gslatex google-sheets-to-latex (plugin) gslatex->gs

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MurMurHash3, an ultra fast hash algorithm for C# / .NET

Image
Finding good hash functions for larger data sets is always challenging. The well know hashes, such as MD5, SHA1, SHA256 are fairly slow with large data processing and their added extra functions (such as being cryptographic hashes) isn’t always required either. Performance and low collision rate on the other hand is very important, so many new hash functions were inverted in the past few years. One of the most notable ones is MurMurHash3, which is an improved version of its predecessor (v2). The new version can create both 32 bit and 128 bit hash values, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. 64 bit architecture The 32 bit hash isn’t too important for large amount of data matching, so I only worked with and tested the 128 bit version. The latter one is optimized for x86-64 architecture, giving amazing speeds for data processing. As a 128 bit value consists of two 64 integers, the processor is fairly good with working with such large hash values – they are not byte...
. . .

Read more »

Quick select algorithm - find the Kth element in a list in linear time

Image
Quick select algorithm (Hoare's selection algorithm) – select the Kth element or  the first K element  from a list in linear time Working with large datasets is always painful, especially when it needs to be displayed in a ‘human readable’ format. It is a very frequent task to display only the largest, newest, most expensive etc. items. While sorting the whole dataset definitely gives a correct result, it is much slower than it needs to be – it needs at least O(n*log(n)) time and an it often uses recursion for the sorting, so in practice it can be quite slow. The quick select algorithm can get the top K element from a list of N items in linear time, O(n), with a very reasonable multiplication factor. The quick select does not use recursion so the performance is great for even large datasets. Algorithm The idea of the quick select is quite simple: just like with quicksort, select a random element from the list, and place every item that is smaller to the first half o...
. . .

Read more »

ESP32 - send a push notification from the Arduino ESP32 device to your phone

Image
Sending a push notification to your phone from an event from an ESP32 is simple. What you'll need (if you are using a Mac for development): Arduino IDE Arduino for ESP32 Serial port simulator for ESP32 to upload your code to the board Wifi network IFTTT account IFTTT app on your phone Wifi network that your ESP32 board can access Architecture Create an IFTTT applet This should read something like this: If Maker Event "notification", then Send a notification from the IFTTT app Change the notification template Go to the settings of your new IFTTT applet and change the template to include "Value1", like this: Get your Webhook endpoint in IFTTT On your applet, click the triangle looking thing (webhook), then Settings, or simply go to this URL  https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks/settings   Visit the private URL in your browser, replace the trigger name with "notification", so it reads like ...trigger/notification/ with/... and in the Value1 field type in a ...
. . .

Read more »