LaTeX for Philosophers (and other Humanitarians)

Initial reasons to switch

Current reasons to favor LaTeX

The reasons I started using LaTeX aren't exactly the reasons I prefer LaTeX to a word processor now. I do still endorse the reasons above, but I have five new reasons to prefer LaTeX.

Installing on a Mac

If you have a Mac, the best option to download and install MacTeX. If you download and install the main package there, you will install a number of different items. Most importantly, you will install the most recent TeX distribution. These are the tools you need to take a document from a marked-up plain text file to the lovely document you think of as being 'written in LaTeX'. Without this bit, you cannot do anything with LaTeX.

The MacTeX package is great because of all the tools it includes. You could write all your LaTeX files (your .tex files) in a text editor like TextEdit, and then compile them by typing in commands in Terminal.app. But my guess is that if you are reading this document, you are not going to feel comfortable doing all that. Moreover, though a .tex file is just a plain text file, having an editor dedicated to LaTeX (or at least one that has lots of LaTeX related features built in) is priceless.

So what does the MacTeX package include? For my money, the big three items for philosophers will be TeXShop, BibDesk, and Excalibur. I’ll talk about the first two in detail later, but for now I will note that TeXShop is where you will actually compose your paper---it is sort of like your new version of Word or Pages. BibDesk is your new bibliography management tool. And Excalibur is a spell checker.

Download MacTeX. Follow the usual installation instructions.

Installing on a PC (running Windows)

Installing on a Linux PC

Installing a TeX distribution on a Linux platform is straightforward. Just use your package manager to find the texlive package, then install it. This will vary from system to system as the package managers vary. Just be sure to install texlive---if there is an option, install texlive-full.

Installing texlive via your package manager (either the graphical version or on the command line) will get you a TeX distribution. This is the series of packages and commands that will take you from a markup-laced .tex file to a nice .pdf file. But the texlive package will not include a text editor to help you write said .tex files. You want a good text editor for this---it will make your LaTeX life much easier. Fortunately, there are many options out there.

Kevin Kelment (who has given me lots of feedback about the Linux-and-LaTeX options) tells me that Gummi and Kile are very good, very capable LaTeX editors. Download one of them via your package manager.

New lines

You must end a paragraph with a blank line (alternatively, you can type two backslashes). A single return will not be read as the start of a new paragraph. You must enter two returns.

As an example, note that this

will give you a single line of text:

But this

will give you two separate paragraphs:

This is a slightly odd habit to learn, but once you do, it is pretty straightforward. One nice thing is that LaTeX will take care of spacing for you. So you needn't worry about indentation. Nor need you make sure you get two spaces after a period and only one after each word; LaTeX treats multiple spaces as if they were one, and it sorts out the spacing to make your lines look right. Additionally, LaTeX reads three or seven or twenty blank lines as if they were one; you do not have to have exactly one blank line between each paragraph, though you must have at least one blank line.

Italics and bold in LaTeX

If you want to italicize or bold some text, you have to use the proper commands. Any text you put inside the scope of a \emph{} command will be italicized; any text in the scope of a \textbf{} command will be bold. (If you were to nest \emph{} commands, however (e.g., \emph{some \emph{italicized} text}), \emph command has the effect of toggling italics (so your output would be: 'some italicized text'.) Note that on the toolbar of TeXShop there is a drop down menu called 'Macros'; under that menu you will find a 'Text Styles' heading, then an 'Emphasize' (or 'Typeface' then 'Bold') entry. In TeXnicCenter, there is a little button on the bottom left of the toolbar that you can click to make text bold or italic, just like in Word. You'll find something similar on most LaTeX editors.

Quotation marks

Perhaps oddly, LaTeX does not know how to handle quotation marks very well. If you type a standard double-quote mark ("), LaTeX will always compile it as closing quotation marks. So at the start of a quotation, single or double, you need to use a back tick---that looks like this '`' and is typically on the same key as the tilde ~. To finish a quote, you use a double apostrophe. You never use the double-quote symbol. In order to close a single-quote, you use a single apostrophe.

Fortunately, most LaTeX-specific text editors are sophisticated enough to correct this. So if you type a double-quote you'll end up getting a pair of back ticks followed by a pair of apostrophes, with your cursor right in the middle where you want it. So while you need to be aware of this bit of archaic LaTeX behavior, it should likely not alter the way you work at all.

Sections and sub-sections

If you want to start a new section, simply type \section{Title}, filling in the title of the section. If you want a subsection, type \subsection{Title}, filling in the title. LaTeX will take care of the numbering for you.

Special symbols in LaTeX

There are some special symbols in LaTeX. If you type a percent sign, for example (%), LaTeX takes that to mean that it should ignore everything that follows on the line. So if my .tex file were to include the following:

The compiled document would look like this:

This means the above sample prologue is full of comments LaTeX will ignore. These are simply notes to explain to you what the various commands do and what your options are. LaTeX likewise gives special meaning to curly braces and amperstands. So if you want to type any of these symbols, you must escape them; that is, you must put a backslash directly in front of them: \% \{ \}. Backslashes are a different matter. They are special symbols as well. But if you backslash-escape a backslash (e.g., \\), you will get the symbol for a new line. Instead, if you need to use a backslash you must write \backslash.

Spaces

Relatedly, spaces can be slightly tricky when using LaTeX. One of the nice things about LaTeX is that a very advanced algorithm takes care of inter- and intra- word spacing. You needn't put two spaces between sentences; LaTeX will put the best spacing between them given the context. But because of this, LaTeX is somewhat ignorant about periods: it assumes every period ends a sentence. So it will put the same amount of space between the words Mr. Jones as it does between the sentences composition. But Lewis. To get the spacing right, you need to tell LaTeX to use one space in the first case and just let it use the default behavior in the second. To do this, you would write Mr.\ Jones. The backslash tells the LaTeX compiler that you mean there to be only one space between those words. [Thanks to Gregory Wheeler for suggesting I include this here.]

If you want your spacing to be perfect, you'll always stick a backslash after a period that does not terminate a sentence. I don't run into occasions to do this very often. Sometimes I'll need to do it with an etc.\ but or an et al.\ argue, but these are pretty rare. The good news (for me at least), is that if you happen to forget to use the backslash space, the spacing difference is typically not noticeable. At least, it isn't for me. I'm sure there are some occasions where I would really want to be perfectly precise, but I usually don't care too terribly much. In fact, I forgot about this point until Greg mentioned it to me in an email---this entire document is written without any such backslash spaces after abbreviations! Nevertheless, I thought Greg was right and I should mention it here for the sake of completeness. Consider yourself notified.

Footnotes

You must tell LaTeX about footnotes explicitly. To do this, use the \footnote{Footnote text.} command. Do not leave a space between the command and the punctuation it is to follow, else you will get an odd space. Your footnotes will be embedded in your text when you are working on your .tex file. (They'll be lovely footnotes in the .pdf, of course.) For me, this was one of the hardest parts of the transition to LaTeX. It can be difficult to figure out where a footnote begins and ends when it is embedded in the paragraph, and it is difficult to change footnote 23 when the notes in the .tex file lack numbers. TeXShop (and TeXnicCenter, I think) have a feature that helps here: Sync. When you are in a .pdf or a .tex file, right click (or Command + click, or Control + click, depending on your setup) on any part of either file and you will be placed more or less in that same spot in the other file. It is not perfect, but it helps.

Another suggestion for dealing with footnotes: since LaTeX ignores anything after a percent sign, you can write something like the following to set your footnotes apart in the .tex file:

end of sentence.%
    %
    %
    %
    \footnote{The footnote text.}
    %
    %
    %

[Thanks to Alex Skiles for this suggestion.]

LaTeX citations

If you like, you can do your citations like you probably used to: you can write Lewis (1986) when you want to cite On the Plurality of Worlds, and then create a called 'Bibliography' where you type in the bibliographic information. A better way is to use BibTeX and BibDesk or JabRef. I'll explain those more later.

Dashes and hypens

Finally, note that LaTeX is kind of picky about dashes and hyphens. If you want to type a hyphen, as in 'sub-set', you want to type a single hyphen or minus sign. If you want to type a dash between page numbers you want to type two hyphens (so 22--24). If you want an em dash, you need to type three hyphens (so that is the view---though I). And if you need a minus sign you type a hyphen within the scope of the math environment (an opening and closing dollar sign (or a \( \)) mark that environment within a paragraph, so $-3$ would give you negative three).

An important note

You must create your bibliography file in the right location. If you don't it can't be found when you compile your document, and that defeats the purpose. There are two locations you can use. You could put your .bib file in the folder that houses your .tex file. BibTeX (the compiler you run to turn cite keys in your .tex file into the format LaTeX needs to compile them) can find them that way. But if you do this, you obviously cannot use one big bibliography for all your papers (unless you keep everything in one folder). Alternatively, you could create a duplicate .bib file for every paper you write, but these would be difficult to keep synchronized.

There is a better option. To use it, you need to create a new folder. (This applies to Macs only. I don't know where you should put your bibliography if you use a PC. Sorry.) If you open up the Finder, it will likely come up to your main user folder. That should bear your user name as its name. (Mine is charlietanksley.) This folder contains a Documents folder, a Downloads folder, a Music folder, etc. You want to open the Library folder. Create a folder in that folder called texmf. In the texmf folder, create a pair of folders: one called bibtex and one called tex. We'll set the tex folder aside for now. In the bibtex folder, create another pair of folders: one called bib and one called bst. Put your bibliography in the bib folder. My bibliography can be found at the following location: charlietanksley/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib/mybib.bib. You should put yours at the same location modulo a pair of changes: your user name should replace my user name, and the name of your bibliography should stand in for mybib.bib.

If you put your bibliography here, TeXShop knows where to look in the compilation process. It also knows where to look to help you insert references into your document. And that, as we'll see, is a very big help.

The natbib package

I am pretty sure that LaTeX has some default citation resources built in. But I don't think they are that good. And it is easy to have exactly the commands you want. So I'll explain how to do that.

To generate the various references we philosophers need, you will want to use the natbib package. The package is rather well documented, so if you need more information, you should certainly check that out. (You can find documentation for any package in TeXShop by searching for it by name if you click on Help in the menu bar and then Show help for package. But you can find the natbib documentation here.)

There are three distinct elements involved in using the natbib package: invoking the package in your prologue, citing sources, and controlling the look of the final bibliography .

\usepackage{natbib}
    \setcitestyle{aysep={}}

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
    
    % the rest of the prologue
    
    \usepackage{natbib}
    \setcitestyle{aysep={}}
    
    \begin{document}
    
    \maketitle
    
    % Body of your paper\
    
    \bibliographystyle{dcu} % or \bibliographystyle{Phil_Review} or whatever
    \bibliography{your_bibliography_file}
    
    \end{document}

Bibliographic footnotes

You need to follow a slightly different set of directions if you want to do full citations in footnotes (where, e.g., the first footnote that mentions a text includes the full citation information). I've written a detailed post on my blog. Since this is a slightly more advanced topic, I'm not going to discuss the details here. But you can read the details on the blog, or you can download a pdf version at www.charlietanksley.net/pdf/latex-footnote-citations.pdf.

TeXShop and BibDesk integration

There is one hitch in the bibliography management system described above. Instead of remembering that you want to cite Lewis's On the Plurality of Worlds, you have to remember that you want to cite that book plus the unique cite key for the book. This isn't so hard for the books and papers you cite all the time, but it is difficult for papers you cite infrequently. Coming up with a cite key generation system that works for you will help this a little bit. But it won't really solve the problem. Thankfully, the people who wrote TeXShop have come up with an elegant solution to this problem. (A number of text editors have similar fixes for this problem. You can find a very similar solution for Vim and TextMate. In the near future I hope to play around on a PC and see how TeXWorks handles this issue. But for the time being, I'll only talk about TeXShop.)

In TeXShop, to use this functionality, simply start typing your cite command, then hit the F5 key once you type the open curly bracket. (BibDesk needs to be running for this to work; but if it is not open, the most recent version of TeXShop will open it. If you have trouble getting this to work, try opening BibDesk.) You'll get a little popup window with your bibliography in it that you can navigate with the up and down arrows. Hit when you get to the entry you want, and TeXShop will stick it in your document. If you start typing part of the name, that will narrow down the list of options. So if I type \citep{Lew and hit F5, I get the following little list:

This is, obviously, a quite handy feature. Just select your reference, hit , then type your } and you are done.

Printing your citations and bibliography

Once you have written a paper full of \citet{} commands and have called the bibliography in a style you like, you need to compile your paper correctly. If you just compile it using LaTeX, you will not get a bibliography. You will get a question mark everywhere you wanted a citation, and you will get a blank called 'References' at the end of the document.

To get your bibliography and citations to print, you need to compile your document in multiple steps. First, compile it using LaTeX. This creates a list of the cite keys you used (I think that is what it does.) Then, compile it using BibTeX (you'll find this in the same menu as the 'compile with LaTeX' feature). This generates a file with the relevant bibliographic information. Now compile your document with LaTeX again. This is the step where LaTeX is told what each cite key corresponds to, and it isn't until this step that you get question marks replaced with citations. I think that should do it. But I always compile with LaTeX one more time just to be sure all the details get ironed out.

So when you are ready to get a pdf file, you will

1. Run LaTeX.
2. Run BibTeX.
3. Run LaTeX.
4. Run LaTeX.

Then you are done. You have your first full paper.

Though I think a big selling point of LaTeX is the fact that you can produce beautifully typeset documents with a minimum of effort, I'd be lying if I said I just use the basic article document class with no adornments. You can while away many an afternoon getting your papers to look exactly like you want. You can argue about whether this is time wasted. But if you are interested in tweaking your document in this way, I'll discuss some popular packages and options in the next .

Spacing

There are three main options for double-spacing your paper.

The first is to use the setspace package. Anytime you 'use the X package', for any package X, you do so by adding it in your prologue via a \usepackage{} command, perhaps with some additional arguments, and perhaps with some additions to the body of the document. To use the setspace package you need to do two things:

1. Add \usepackage{setspace} to your prologue.
2. Add \doublespace at the start of your document (likely after \maketitle).

If you want to single-space the bibliography, you can just add \singlespace before the \makebibliography command. Anything you want single-spaced can be made single-spaced by adding this command (and just add the \doublespace command when you want to switch back).

I like the setspace package. One thing it does not do is double-space your footnotes. I like that, but some journals do not. To double-space everything, you'll want to use the second of the three spacing options.

The second option is to redefine the default spacing between baselines (the bottom of letters like 'b'). You do this by adding the following line to your prologue:

\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{2}

If you prefer 1.5 spacing, simply put a 1.5 in for the 2. Since this redefines the baseline for the document, it will change the spacing for footnotes as well as the main text.

The third option is a bit more powerful than the first two. It makes more global changes than just double-spacing things, but these are changes you might like (specifically, it converts footnotes to endnotes, changes the spacing of the document, alters the indentation of block quotes, and uses smaller fonts for the title, headers, etc.). Gregory Wheeler has put together a package specifically for philosophy papers. To use it, just go to his LaTeX for Philosophers page and download the philosophy.sty package. If you are on a Mac, put this in the user/Library/texmf/tex/latex directory you manually created; if you are on a PC, I gather that you ought to put it in the latex folder within MikTeX, where this will likely be C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\latex, though the version number might differ.

Once you have downloaded philosophy.sty and put it in a directory where LaTeX can find it during compiling, you need to specify that the package be used. This will require a change to your prologue and a change near your bibliography.

Put the following in your prologue:

\usepackage{endnotes,philosophy}

This tells LaTeX to use two packages: the philosophy package you want to use and the endnotes package that the philosophy package relies on.

To get the endnotes to print, you need to explicitly put a \noteshere command where you want the notes. This will likely be just before or just after your bibliography. Add this command in and your paper will be double-spaced. It will also have what you might think is a more traditional look.

Fonts

At some point you will likely want to use a new font. LaTeX is quite old, and it is made to interact with only a small set of fonts. The easiest way to use a new font is to use XeTeX. (For our purposes, we can think of XeTeX as a super-set of the LaTeX commands---if you compile your paper using XeTeX, you can use all the LaTeX commands and packages, but you can also use some packages that go beyond LaTeX. Relevant here are the packages that let you use fonts easily.) If you use XeTeX, your final pdf file can use any font you have on your computer.

To use XeTeX you need to do three things.

First, you need to insert the following at the very start of your prologue (even before the documentclass{article} command):

%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
    %!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode

Then you need to stick the following in your prologue somewhere:

\usepackage{fontspec,xltxtra,xunicode}
    \defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
    \setromanfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Hoefler Text}
    \setsansfont[Scale=MatchLowercase,Mapping=tex-text]{Gill Sans}
    \setmonofont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Andale Mono}

If you are using a serif font in your document, just change Hoefler Text to any font you want to use—you could even use Times New Roman if you need to. (If you are using a sans-serif, change the Gill Sans to whatever you like.)

Now write your paper like normal. When you are ready to compile it, do not compile it with LaTeX. Instead, compile it with XeTeX (this will clearly be an option wherever you ordinarily select to compile with LaTeX).

The major text editors have an XeTeX document template that will include all these basic bits for you. In fact, I pulled the prologue elements above directly from the XeTeX template in TeXShop.

Margins

The default LaTeX margins seem huge at first. They are larger than 1 inch in order to make the document easier to read. But you might want to change the margins because you think they are too big or because you need specific margins for a dissertation or thesis. Changing the margins is easy. There is (or should be) a line in your prologue that says \usepackage{geometry}. This package can take margin sizes as arguments. So to get 1 inch margins all around, just write

\usepackage[right=1in,left=1in,top=1in,bottom=1in]{geometry}

And if you want larger or smaller margins on either side, just change that number.

Symbols

One of the beauty of LaTeX is the way it typesets formulae. If you write logical notation, LaTeX is wonderful.

Each symbol is called by a command, and each command has a specific mode. Just as you type a command to make some text italic, you type a command to get LaTeX to print a symbol. For example, the code for the existential quantifier (the backwards 'E') is \exists. And the universal quantifier is called by the \forall command.

Modes. Most of the commands you want for logic can only be used in math mode. To put a bit of text in math mode, surround it with either (a) dollar signs or (b) backslashes and parentheses. So you would write either $logic stuff$ or \(logic stuff\). To write 'there is an x' in symbolic notation, I would type \(\exists (x)\). (The space is necessary. It tells LaTeX that the command is finished. If you typed \(\existsx\), LaTeX would think you meant some other command, the \existsx command.) I have always used the dollar signs, but you can use the backslash parentheses method as well.

All text in math mode is italicized, though not all symbols are. So if you don't want your 'x' italicized in the above example, you would want to type \(\exists\)(x) (the dollar sign terminates the command, so you do not want an extra space here).

Ordinarily, you write in text mode. There are some symbols you can use in text mode. The most common are the accents on letters (like the little hat on the 'u' in Noûs) and, for me at least, the little symbol. You get the symbol by typing \S in text mode (so \S 2 for example—don't forget the space). You get the accents by typing the right command followed by the letters it ranges over in brackets (so No\^{u}s, for example). Strictly, the braces are not necessary, but they don't hurt, and I like to use them because they help me see what is going on.

Combining math and text. Sometimes you might want to write out a premise or claim using a combination of symbols and text. Any text within the scope of the math mode will be italicized (and some letters will look kind of funny). So you should make sure the words are outside of the scope of the math mode. The most elegant way to do this is to just wrap the words in a \mathrm{} or \text{} command. For example, you might write \(\exists (x)\ \mathrm{some\ text}\ \therefore\ y.\) (more on those extra backslashes in a moment). The (less elegant) alternative is to end the math mode before your text and then start a new math mode before your next symbol. I can see some situations where this might be a good option, but I think the \mathrm{} is better in most instances.

Spacing in math mode. Spaces are collapsed in math mode. If you leave a dozen spaces between two characters, they will be eliminated and your characters will appear side by side. This will happen even when you are inside a \mathrm{} command. To avoid having all your words and symbols run together, you merely need to stick a backslash at the end of every word you want followed by a space. Hence the extra backslashes in my example in the last paragraph.

There are a number of useful resources for learning or entering these commands. Gregory Wheeler put together a shortish pdf document that lists all the symbols you will probably need. You can find that here. There is a very long, comprehensive guide to symbols at CTAN here.

Perhaps more helpful than those guides is your text editor. If you are using TeXShop, just click Window -> LaTeX Panel in the menu bar and you will get a floating window listing all the symbols you might want (plus all the environments you might want, like 'itemize', 'quote', etc.). Just click the symbol you want and TeXShop will put it in the document, though it will not add the dollar signs for math mode-only symbols. I am pretty sure that TeXnicCenter has something similar. But from a first-pass, I don't seen any such option in TeXworks. If there isn't such a helpful menu, Wheeler's short guide is easy enough to use, and you will learn the codes you use often pretty quickly. (There is also a free iPhone app called LaTeX Help that lists all the basic symbols.)

Some symbols are only available to you if you use the right package. I follow TeXShop's lead and always include the \usepackage{amssymb} command in my prologue, as this allows me to use all the basic math symbols. And there are some symbols you might want to use that aren't defined in a package. At his LaTeX for for Philosophers page, Gregory Wheeler has a list of symbols of interest to logicians. These aren't part of any package, but he describes what you need to put in the prologue of your paper to be able to use the particular symbol you want.

List Environments

The LaTeX list environment is very helpful for writing philosophical papers. Using it will allow you to write nice numbered premise arguments and inset definitions.

There are three kinds of lists: itemized lists, enumerated lists, and description lists. They are similar in structure, but they produce different sorts of lists.

\begin{itemize}
    \item Your first item.
    \item Your second item.
    \item Etc.
    \end{itemize}

\begin{enumerate}
    \item First item.
    \item Second item.
    \item Third item.
    \end{enumerate}

\begin{enumerate}[(1*).]
    \item First item.
    \item Second item.
    \item Third item.
    \end{enumerate}

\begin{enumerate}
    \setcounter{enumi}{4}
    \item Fifth item.
    \item Sixth item.
    \end{enumerate}

\begin{enumerate}
    \item First item.
    \item Second item.
    \item[\(\therefore\)] Conclusion.
    \end{enumerate}

... start prologue
    \usepackage{enumitem}
    ... end prologue
    
    \begin{enumerate}[start=4, label=(\arabic**).]
    \item Fourth item.
    \item Fifth item.
    \end{enumerate}
    
    Some text explaining something or other.
    
    \begin{enumerate}[resume, label=(\arabic**).]
    \item Sixth item.
    \item Seventh item.
    \end{enumerate}

\begin{description}
    \item[Thesis] My thesis.
    \end{description}

Headers

The default LaTeX paper header and footer is kind of bland. It just includes the page number, centered in the footer. Not bad, but not great, either. To customize this, use the fancy header package. This is likely installed by default; if not, use TeX Live Utility or let MikTeX install it for you. You can find the full documentation here, but here are the basics you need to know to use it right away.

First, put the following in your prologue:

\usepackage{fancyhdr}
    \usepackage{lastpage}
    \pagestyle{fancy}
    \lhead{}\chead{}\rhead{}
    \lfoot{}\cfoot{}\rfoot{}
    \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0.0pt}

Whatever you put in the scope of \lhead{} will appear in the header on the left side. \chead{} and \rhead{} put text in the center and right side of the header, respectively. And the \lfoot{}, etc. commands do the same for the footer.

The lastpage package is optional. If you use it, then you can put a 'page m of n' kind of page number in the header or footer. To do this, just put \thepage\ of \pageref{LastPage} wherever you want that to appear. (Note that you need to compile the paper twice with LaTeX to get this to work right---the first time, LaTeX counts the pages; the second time, it enters the number in the right place.)

Second, you want to add a \thispagestyle{empty} command right after your \maketitle command. This gives you a blank first page. If you wanted, you could change the 'empty' out for a 'fancy', and your fancy header would show up on page one. But if you have anything in the header, that will show up above your title. And that just looks weird.

More

There are lots of great packages you can use to customize your LaTeX document. Peter Smith's LaTeX for Logicians is a great resource once you have the basics I have detailed here down.

Over the course of time, I plan on detailing the packages I use and things I learn about LaTeX on my blog devoted to matters technical PhilTeX. Since I don't learn something new about LaTeX every day, the posting is light. But if you've found this guide helpful, I think you'll find the content over there helpful as well.

An update on PhilTeX: PhilTeX is now a group blog. There are a handful of contributors posting informative and helpful posts each week. This is much better than when it was just me writing for it!

If you have any questions feel free to email at charlie.tanksley@gmail.com.