How to make LaTeX documents that are not bad.

This document was inspired by a book called “XeLaTeX appliqué aux sciences humaines” by Maïeul Rouquette.

He wrote a fairly comprehensive manual on how to use LaTeX for humanities, explaining a lot of FAQs, including long citations, and such. Really it looks a little like “LaTeX packages I found useful for myself”, however, I wouldn’t look at such a work with arrogance, as although this kind of work can be accomplished by “just carefully reading the documentation”, doing that is not fast and not cheap, and such “seemingly straightforward” manuals in reality encompass a lot of wisdom and save a lot of time.

This is a document for myself, which might have been called “LaTeX for idiots who nevertheless want to do science”. The key attitude in it is that really, idiots should offload as much computation to the computers, and only spend their own limited brains to solve the problems that no computer, no matter how strong, no algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, can solve.

Speaking simply, scientific (LaTeX) documents should be as easy to read, process, and understand as possible, and if some feature LaTeX offers is usually omitted by people submitting papers to scientific journals, this is not a reason to follow their bogus example; this feature should be used in new documents, at least those written for oneself.