[Tex/LaTex] Tabs versus spaces for indenting TeX documents

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The title tells it all. What is a "correct" way to indent TeX documents?

Different programming languages have different conventions. Python recommends 4 spaces. Your Makefile will not even work if you do not use tab for indenting. Generally normalized (Allman style) BSD C code is indented with tabs of width 8.

Being an OpenBSD user I tend to use tab (set to 8 characters) to indent all my code including TeX except Python. However due to the fact that I use NVI with displayed line numbers the effective width of my terminal is only 72 characters which, coupled with 8 character indentation, makes some of my TeX documents difficult to read.

On another hand quick look at my

/usr/local/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex

directory reveals that LaTeX style files are indented with two spaces. Is that true in general? Should I use the same convention for LaTeX documents too?

Best Answer

What is a "correct" way to indent TeX documents?

I believe there is no "correct" way -- certainly no single correct way -- to indent input lines of an ordinary TeX or LaTeX document. (The situation may be different for input that adheres to LaTeX3 coding methods, but I'm not sure of that.) As long as TeX can parse the input, it's completely agnostic as to the form of the input it receives. Any indentation practices -- whether indenting with "soft tabs" or "hard" spaces, and whether the indentation amounts to 2, 4, or 8 spaces -- are therefore entirely cosmetic and voluntary in nature. To be sure, I don't believe anyone in their right mind would advocate not using some rule for indenting parts of one's TeX code.

A separate thought: In order to raise the readability of TeX input code, a technique that is probably as important as (or possibly even more important than) adopting some rule for indentation is using vertical whitespace liberally and consistently -- between paragraphs, above a sectioning command, before and after a \newenvironment statement, before and after a LaTeX float, etc.

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[Tex/LaTex] Most useful sed one-liners for TeX users

I mostly use sed for searching & replacing within TeX files in whole directories. For example:

find "." -name "*.tex" | xargs sed -i -e "s/\(\\usepackage\){times}/\1{mathptmx}/g"

This changes all occurrences of \usepackage{times} into \usepackage{mathptmx}, to enable Times font both for text and for math.

find searches all .tex files
the pipe symbol | allows using the output of one command as input of another
xargs takes the list of file names, returned by find, and makes them into one line
sed applies the desired change for each file contained in that line. I use options
- -i for in-place editing (you could specify a suffix for making backups)
- -e for executing a script, here s/.../.../.. for search & replace
sed understands regular expression syntax, here I additionally used backslashes \ for quoting some characters with a special meaning for the shell, such as parentheses and the backslash itself
The backslash \ at the end of the first line is for breaking the line, for better displaying here. You don't need it if you type all into one command line.

For such frequently used command lines I usually create a shell function or a shell script, so I don't have to type much and just call my function/script with a regular expression as argument.

[Tex/LaTex] way to set the tab length in any other unit than pixels in TeXworks

This is a currently open feature request for TeXworks, so as of this time, there is no way to change the tabs to spaces.

There are other editors for Windows that have good LaTeX support. See:

LaTeX Editors/IDEs

In that list, Vim is included, as it has very good LaTeX support. There's a version for Windows, I believe.

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[Tex/LaTex] way to set the tab length in any other unit than pixels in TeXworks

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