Use LaTeX best practices and packages

[carlostome]

I'm opening this issue to collect a bunch of do/don't for latex which we should agree to follow in the document (if we stick to latex (see #680).

• Use:

  • cleveref for references. Provides a family of commands \cref which typeset the type of thing being referenced.
  • biblatex for citations. Provides new commands for citation depending on how the cited reference is being used (as subject, object, withing parenthesis etc). It can be setup to use biber as a backend, which among others supports bib files that use UTF-8.
  • xparse for a reimplemented interface to define commands (this package is now part of latex itself)

• Avoid:

  • xspace (author recommends against it)
    To end a command with correct spacing use {}. E.g. \canVote{}.

• TBD

  • Agree on a naming convention for references.
  • Find a proper way of splitting big figures across pages.

[WhatisRT]

Can you say a few words about what problems these packages solve? I'm all for improving the LaTeX code, but I like knowing what is actually being improved.