edit

This page is just some notes on preferred style for latex source files, including how they fit in the directory structure on the publications repository in github.

1. Each project file will typically have a tex directory. All latex files will be placed in this directory. There will be a sub-directory tex/diagrams which contains files for figures and images in the paper. Then each submission or tech report is in its own subdirectory. The subdirectory is named with the conference initials (small letters) followed by the last two digits of the year, e.g. nips11 for a 2011 submission to NIPS. For journals we use a short name for the journal e.g. jmlr for Journal of Machine Learning Research or bioinf for bioinformatics.
2. When writing a paper in LaTeX use bold to denote vectors and bold capital to denote matrices. Be careful to apply the bold only to the relevant letter, e.g. \mathbf{B}\mathbf{B}^\top not \mathbf{BB}^\top as the latter makes it much harder to do a search and replace when changing notation.
3. Our standard notation is in publications/tex_inputs/notationDef.tex and standard macros are in publications/tex_inputs/notationDef.tex. Use these macros for writing formula, if you need to design a new macro then you should include it in these files. This helps ensure we are consistent across papers in notation. Do note define macros in the separate latex files, unless they are redefinitions of standard macros being used to avoid notation clashes.
4. Use \text{} around the d in differentiation and integration to distinguish it from a variable d.
5. Use \begin{align*} \end{align*} for unnumbered equations across multiple rows, use \[ \] for an unnumbered equation in display mode on single line. Use \begin{align} \end{align} and \begin{equation} \end{equation} for the equivalent on a single line.
6. Do not use ALL CAPITALS for section headings, if the style file calls for this, latex is quite capable of capitalizing everything for itself, however it is not capable of correctly uncapitalizing!
7. Use group bib files, don’t generate your own separate bib file. Group files tend to be more free of errors through long term use. They are kept in publications/bib/ and are called lawrence.bib, other.bib and zbooks.bib. All books, proceedings and edited volumes go in zbooks.bib which is included last (bibtex does only one pass through to find cross references, so the cross referenced books need to be included last). other.bib is for non-group papers and lawrence.bib for group papers. When adding entries to the bib file keep the key style used (Authorname:wordXX) where XX is the last two digits of the year and word is a helpful word for remembering the nature of the reference.
8. Always put data points as the rows of a matrix, and data features in the columns. This is a standard from statistics. The matrix is known as the design matrix.
9. When discussing optimization it is standard to minimize functions, so typically we minimize a negative log likelihood.
10. All section headings should be capitalized, except very common words like “and” and “the”.