Cool fonts

Are you sick of the same old (but still, nice to read) Times New Roman font? Well, here are some alternatives.

Serif fonts:

\usepackage{palatino}
\usepackage{charter}

Sans-serif fonts (for code snippets etc):

\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[scaled=1]{helvet}
\usepackage[scaled=.8]{beramono}

If you have further additions, please post them as a comment to this post!

Using abbreviations

It frequently happens that you using the same, long term in your document. For example, my implementation is called "Copacabana". Creating an abbreviation has many advantages: First, when you decide to change the name, it suffices to change the name in one place only. Secondly, the same holds for formatting.

Here's how not to do it:

\newcommand{\copa}{Copacabana}

Why not? Imagine the following LaTeX source:

The tool \copa is the best!

results in the following output:

The tool Copacabanais the best!

The solution is using \xspace! This command inserts a space only where it makes sense, e.g., between two words, but not between the word and a punctuation mark.

\newcommand{\copa}{Copacabana\xspace}

Nice, ey? For using \xspace, you must add the following to the header of your LaTeX file:

\usepackage{xspace}