Typography Tips

Here are some typographical rules to make your papers prettier and easier to understand!

• Generally prefer \emph or some other "semantic" macro over a direct formatting macro like \textit.

  A \emph{giraffe} is basically a long-necked cow.
  

  Sometimes it's useful to introduce your own "semantic" macros for formatting concepts that appear often in your paper, for example, if you're writing a paper with lots of animal definitions, you might introduce \animal as a synonym for \emph above. This makes it easy to change the formatting of animal references.

• Multi-character names in math mode must be wrapped in \mathit.

  $\mathit{force} = \mathit{mass} * \mathit{acceleration}$
  

• Non-terminal periods must have either an escaped space (\ ) or non-breaking space (~) after them.

  Lots of physicists have great hair, e.g.\ Dr.~Einstein.
  

• Em-dashes should not have spaces around them.

  It was---at the risk overstating things---a perfectly OK time.
  

• Use the same font in figures and in-line text for referring to the same concept. For example, if you use small caps for rule names in figures, also use small caps when referring to rules by name in the text. If you use typewriter font for code in figures, also use typewriter font when referring to elements of that code in text.

• References to sections, figures, theorems should be capitalized.

  For more details, see Figure~\ref{fig:details} in Section~\ref{sec:results}.