# Four LaTeX Mistakes

From the excellent TeX Tips twitter feed I got a pointer to a useful article from John Cook. The article is about the top 4 LaTeX mistakes that Cook, a practicing mathematician, sees in books and articles. You might think that these would be esoteric fine points about typesetting but they’re actually elementary things that every $\TeX$ and $\LaTeX$ user should know.

The one I liked the most was the second that concerns adding a thin space before a differential. I always do this because it does look better but it never occurred to me why that is. Cook explains it simply in an “aha! moment” for me: the differential, $dx$ say, is a single unit so you want to set it apart a bit so it doesn’t look like the product, in this case, of $d$ and $x$. Notice how much better

$\int x \, dx$ looks than $\int x dx$ does. This is actually the most technical of the errors Cook describes. The others are really elementary.

If you’re a $\TeX$ or $\LaTeX$ user, even if you’re merely embedding it in an Org file, be sure to give Cook’s article a read. You definitely don’t want to be making any of the mistakes he describes.

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