[Tex/LaTex] Folder structure of your work

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Users,
I am using LaTeX for homework at university. By now, I had always other programs generating some files, that I used in my LaTeX-document. For example MATLAB generated some graphs, Inkscape generated some pictures and so on.

I always used a folder structure like this:

/experiment01/matlab/
/experiment02/matlab/
/experiment02/inkscape/
...

/beamer-presentation01/
/beamer-presentation02/
...

/fulltext01/
/fulltext02/
...

With this, I am on the one hand able to use figures again in different versions of presentations and the thesis text. On the other hand, my latex references break, if I rename folders. Also the old presentations do not have a fixed state, because the sketches done by Inkscape might change (if not versioned).

What do you recommend? Do you keep your proper work separated from the LaTeX-files? Do you refer to the same figure again in different documents or do you copy it?

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This is highly dependent on your work flow. For example, I do all of my plotting in pgfplots so data is central to me rather than plot images. A typical paper that I'm writing will have

A master folder with the .tex file. Inside the master folder are:
- A folder for images, figures and externalized (it using TikZ/pgfplots) figures.
- A folder for data. Keep this away from your programs!
- A folder for scripts and programs. Don't write directly to the data folder!

However, each paper is a very simple document. For something much larger like my thesis I had an elaborate directory structure, with each chapter in its own folder. The master .tex file sat in a special folder called build rather than at the top of the structure. Each chapter was otherwise treated like a paper in the simple structure above, and there were a couple of other special folders to contain the preamble and macros etc.

For (very) simple documents it may not be worth having any structure at all, opting for a pool of files in a single folder.

Putting aside my paranoia about having data to be published in the same directory as scripts and programs that can overwrite it, modern operating systems offer simple ways to view the contents of a directory by type in the UI. In a *nix terminal this is trivial too with something like

ls *.dat

to view just data files. One could therefore make a case for no special directory structure at all for all but the largest documents.

A final note; for large documents, consider using version control. I suggest Git, but that's a matter of taste. It's saved my skin more times than I care to mention.

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[Tex/LaTex] What are good working practices for VCS with LaTeX documents

First off, you may not want to use LaTeX directly if you want to use it as a whiteboard to develop ideas. You may be better off using Org-mode to draft your paper. You can embed LaTeX in Org-mode and you will probably be more effective than using LaTeX directly. The details on using Org-mode for drafting are not hard to learn, especially if you already use Emacs. Since Org-mode stores files as plain text they can be tracked with version control.

I use git to track some documents I work on and I mostly use it as a safety net. Knowing that every change I do may be recovered is great because I can make big changes to documents without being afraid of losing anything.

When using version control privately, i.e. you are the only one who commits, it may be thought of as using a system to name groups of changes to documents. So to use it effectively you should make changes of one type or to a particular part of your document and describe the change accordingly in the commit message, e.g. commit after you made a couple of changes to your introduction and make another commit for the changes of your conclusion instead of one commit for everything. However you should not be too pedantic with version control, it should not take over your primary work of writing the text. It is more important that you work effectively and write a good text than that you make the most appropriate commits.

My typical work flow is that I make a repository only after I have document with some substantial content. Then I branch off the master by making a dev branch. I commit all new changes to the dev branch and when I have read the whole document or come to a particular stage at which the document is more stable, e.g. when I turn it into my supervisor, I merge the changes in dev to the master. Then for any new changes I branch into a deb branch again. I also use the tag feature of git to mark particular stages, e.g. a version I sent to someone, which makes it easier to find those stages if I need.

To view changes I use different tools. I both use giggle, tig and git log to see the history of a repository. To compare versions I mostly use meld.

Use one type of project per repository. Grouping things that do not belong together is confusing. Branching is good for making different version of a document, e.g. to split a project into an article and a presentation.

Finally, here is what inspired me to start using version control: http://www.charlietanksley.net/philtex/using-a-version-control-system/

[Tex/LaTex] Organizing images for multiple latex files

_{This is what I will do. Hence it is only relative.}

I will have a folder for my project (say thesis): D:\my-thesis where everything related to my thesis will be stored. Further, I will have subfolders like D:\my-thesis\images, D:\my-thesis\presentations, D:\my-thesis\thesis, D:\my-thesis\codes, ......... etc. Now as we are concentrating on images, I will not worry about how other folders will be but each of these folders will have sub folders depending upon the need.

Let us assume that my thesis will have six different topics (chapters). I will create six folders inside images folder and name them: topic-1, topic-2,... etc. topic-1 folder will have two subfolders: pdf and source. The folder pdf will have all pdf files of my images (I prefer pdf over png) and the source folder will have tikz sources of my images (as almost every diagram I use, will be written using tikz). If I have to use some other kind of file (say .jpg), I will have another folder inside topic-1 and call it jpg. Same is true for topic-2,... etc.

With this folder structure, it is easy to re-use the code for inserting the pictures. I will use \includegraphics[...]{D:/my-thesis/images/topic-1/pdf/de} where de is the picture. Hence the snippet can be used in all places like presentation or thesis.

A MWE will be

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx,epstopdf}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{D:/Harish/TeX/paper-1/figures/eps/figure-5}
\end{document}

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[Tex/LaTex] What are good working practices for VCS with LaTeX documents

[Tex/LaTex] Organizing images for multiple latex files

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