Table generation in LaTeX

One of the more fiddly things to do in LaTeX is table generation. Fortunately there are online generators that will take your tables from spreadsheet programs as input. Here is the one I’m using for small tables.
Example output using tables generator with the booktabs package:

For long, multi-page tables, it’s best to construct your table in LibreOffice, then use the Writer2LaTeX extension to convert it to LaTeX, which works amazingly well. Once in LaTeX, you can make further adjustments to the table, taking full advantage of the longtable package in LaTeX, like repeating 1st and last rows, abbreviated captions, ‘continued on next page’ footers etc…

LaTeX: Dealing with overfull badboxes

Writing a PhD thesis and with well over 250 pages and 40+ high resolution images, LaTex is far more efficient than other word processors:

There are some issues to deal with once the document becomes more complex. Currently I’m dealing with overfull badboxes. Luckily there are guides on dealing with this, one of them here.
Several things can get you out of trouble. One is the \sloppy command, which makes things less stringent when LaTeX tries to justify the problematic line:

\sloppy
problematic text
\fussy

Or you can use sloppypar environment

\begin{sloppypar}
problematic text
\end{sloppypar}

Another way is to alter \emergencystretch which is the assumed stretchability of every line when badness and demerits are computed, in cases where overfull boxes are otherwise unavoidable. More on this here. So altering this parameter may help in some cases, eg:

\emergencystretch=.5em

LaTeX: BibLaTeX style

Biblatex is quite a powerful bibliography management system for LaTeX. Rather than try to find styles to suit your needs, it’s more straight forward to just alter one of the default styles. I made the following alterations to the authoryear-comp style for my thesis, the following gets added to the preamble:

\usepackage[
	style=authoryear-comp,
	sorting=nyt, %sort intext by name year then title
	maxcitenames=2, %max intext authors
	maxbibnames=30, %max endtext authors
	uniquename=false, %Robin Smith 2011, Alex Smith 2011 printed as 'Smith 2011a,b'
	url=false, %Dont print URL
	firstinits=true, %stops first author full name printed in bibliography
	uniquelist=false, %will add 'a' and 'b' if 1st authors are identical
	dashed=false, %print recurring author/editor names instead of replacing them by a dash
	sortcites=true, %sorts intext citations by same pattern as bibliography
	backend=biber
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{main.bib} % % name/location of your .bib file

Then call in-text citations with:

\parencite{citationID} %in parentheses
\cite{citationID} %no parentheses
\textcite{citationID} %only year in parentheses