# Time-saving (technology) tricks for writing papers

I have over the years learned some tricks which saves a lot of time, and I wish I had known them earlier. Some tricks are LaTeX-specific, but other tricks are more general. Let me start with a few examples:

• Use LaTeX macros and definitions for easy reuse. This is particularly useful for when making many similar-looking figures. Another example is to make a macro that includes the $$q$$ when typing q-binomial coefficients. This ensures consistency.

• In documents with many Tikz figures, compilation time can become quite brutal. However, spreading out all figures in many documents is also inconvenient. Solution: Use one standalone file, where each figure appears as a separate .pdf page. Then include the .pdf pages as figures in the main document. All figures are in one .tex-file, making it easy to reuse macros. I find this trick extremely useful, as it does not lead to duplicate code spread over several files.

• Use bibtex and .bib files. I prefer to use doi2bib to convert doi's to a .bib entry (some light editing might be needed).

• For collaboration, use git. Also, Dropbox or similar for backups. Keeping track of versions has saved me several times.

• Learn Regular expressions, for search-and-replace in .tex files. This is useful for converting hard-coded syntax into macros.

• Get electronic (local) copies of standard references, and make sure to name them in a sane manner. Then it is easy to quickly search for the correct book. These are available when the wifi is down, or while traveling.

• Do file reorganization and cleanup regularly. Get final versions of your published papers, and store in a folder, as you'll need them for job applications. Hunting down (your own!) published papers in pay-walled journals can be surprisingly tedious!

• Take the time to move code snippets from project-specific notebooks, and turn into software packages for easy reuse. Also, it is sometimes worth to spend time optimizing code - waiting for code to run does not seem like a big deal, but I have noticed that small improvements in my work-flow can have big impact. I am much more likely to try out a conjecture if it is easy to run the code.

• Somewhat similar question from 2019: Your professional ${\rm\LaTeX}$ experiences that saves your time in typesetting. (Although that one was specifically about LaTeX.) – Martin Sleziak Jul 11 '20 at 9:41
• Regarding tikz compile times, I find \tikzexternalize very useful. Make sure to give figures names so they don’t get recompiled every time a new figure gets inserted earlier in the file. – Martin Hairer Jul 11 '20 at 21:40
• Rather a general advice than a trick: Follow basic programming guidelines when typesetting in $\LaTeX$ (e.g., proper use of indents, consistent names for variables/macros, and so on). It's one of the basic lessons in programming, but surprisingly many mathematicians ignore it when they typeset in $\LaTeX$. – Jochen Glueck Jul 11 '20 at 21:59
• github.com/dspinellis/latex-advice – qwr Jul 12 '20 at 5:48
• @darijgrinberg Yes, exactly. Put the tikz code in a separate .tex file, and compile. But instead of having a file for each figure, one can instead put all figs in one file, where figure appear as separate pages (of different sizes). One can then send an argument to includegraphics, to say which page/figure to import. – Per Alexandersson Jul 12 '20 at 19:08

Quiver by Varkor, provides a graphical interface to generate commutative diagrams. I find it extremely useful. Check out his blog: https://varkor.github.io/blog/2020/11/25/announcing-quiver.html

• another similar tool is mathcha.io/editor – glS Jul 14 '20 at 13:38

The most helpful trick for me when it comes to writing stuff in LaTeX is using vim. Since you can configure macros, abbreviations, plugins, and whatnot, it makes writing very very fast:

(There are also other features not shown in the above GIF, such as being able to write vertically/in columns, using multiple cursors to replace text, etc.)

Edit: Here's a small guide on how to get a setup like the one above; sorry for not including this here before.

(If anything is unclear or missing, feel free to either edit this answer or let me know and I'll add/correct it.)

## Vim

Vim is quite infamous for being difficult to learn. While I think this reputation is partly unwarranted, in any case the time you invest learning how to use it might very well turn out to be one of the best time investments of your life, as Fosco said in the comments (it certainly was so for me). A nice guide on how to use vim is this interactive site.

## LaTeX Plugins for Vim

Two very good ones are vimtex and LaTeX-suite. If I recall correctly, vimtex is more actively developed and has more features.

## Abbreviations

These are instructions for vim to replace a string by another word as you type it. For instance, when I type "lrs " in the above GIF, vim replaces it for "locally ringed space ". Some other examples are:

• iow -> in other words
• fab -> $f\colon A\longrightarrow B$
• letring -> Let $R$ be a ring.
• ox -> $\mathrsfso{O}_X$
• cala -> $\mathcal{A}$

You can define an abbreviation by adding the following line to your .vimrc, the file which keeps your configuration for vim:

autocmd FileType tex iabbrev wrt with respect to


(abbreviations are the heart of what makes things so fast in the GIF above)

## Other Plugins

Some other good plugins for speeding things up are the following:

You may add them to vim by first installing vim-plug and then adding the following lines to your .vimrc:

" Plugins
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

Plug 'https://github.com/qpkorr/vim-renamer'
Plug 'terryma/vim-multiple-cursors'

function! BuildYCM(info)
" info is a dictionary with 3 fields
" - name:   name of the plugin
" - status: 'installed', 'updated', or 'unchanged'
" - force:  set on PlugInstall! or PlugUpdate!
if a:info.status == 'installed' || a:info.force
!python3 ./install.py
endif
endfunction
Plug 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe', { 'do': function('BuildYCM') }

call plug#end()


While it is a complete mess, you can find my vim configuration file (.vimrc) here.

(I'm happy to help if you want to set-up vim+LaTeX, but are having trouble to do so :)

• Perhaps it's important to clarify that to get the kind of workflow displayed in the gif requires a lot of practice as well as configuration of vim. I've been using emacs for some time now and my workflow is nowhere as efficient as the one shown here. Really cool stuff, though. I'm also really curious of how does your autocomplete function works, @Théo. I'd love to use something like this in emacs. – user347489 Jul 12 '20 at 9:41
• > Perhaps it's important to clarify that to get the kind of workflow displayed in the gif requires a lot of practice as well as configuration of vim. I agree, but on the other hand those are the best invested 45 minutes of your life. – fosco Jul 12 '20 at 21:16
• @LSpice I think there aren't many big advantages, but here are some minor ones, I think: 1) Readability: using too many macros might make it difficult for other people to understand your source (see also this comment by Nate Eldredge); 2) It keeps your preamble tidier, and you don't have to define the same macro again and again in every .tex file you [1/3] – Théo Jul 14 '20 at 5:22
• Another advantage of abbreviations vs macros: have you ever worked with a co-author with a different, equally invasive set of macros? – Federico Poloni Jul 14 '20 at 6:22
• This is $f\colon A\longrightarrow B$ulous! – Piotr Achinger Jul 14 '20 at 7:36

When writing notes, or collecting references or writing down small lemmas, it might be a good idea to share them on your personal webpage. The fact that someone else might read your stuff, will improve your effort in writing clearly. Moreover, putting things on a web page makes it available from any computer - this can be useful when not bringing your personal laptop.

• To add to this: The notes you personally expect to be the least useful to others -- the ones you upload just for the sake of completeness -- may turn out to get the most interesting feedback. (Happened to me.) – darij grinberg Jul 12 '20 at 20:18

If your university has a subscription, Mathscinet provides much better bib files than any other source (including doi2bib and journal sites), handling the details with painstaking precision: diacritics, escaping capitals in titles, consistent journal names...

I can recall only one case in my career when I needed "light editing" with it (and they fixed it when I sent them an e-mail).

• The bib files produced by mathscinet aren't that good. For example they always duplicate the DOI file, they completely ignore entry types such as @inproceedings, the number and volume fields are not always used correctly, and so on. – Najib Idrissi Jul 13 '20 at 9:25
• @NajibIdrissi What do you mean with "they always duplicate the DOI file"? Do you have an example of number/volume fields used wrongly? – Federico Poloni Jul 13 '20 at 12:08
• Sorry, I meant the DOI field (typo): it appears in the DOI field, but also in the URL field. Volumes are generally misused for books in a series: for e.g. the 123rd entry in the "Mathematical Surveys and Monographs" (random example), you should find number = {123} in the entry, but they put volume = {123}. The volume field would actually indicate that you would be citing the 123rd volume of one single enormous book, not the 123rd entry in the series. This can lead to weird formatting. – Najib Idrissi Jul 13 '20 at 12:23
• So you are OK with a entry displayed as "Doe, J. "The Theory of Stuff". J. Math 123.45. DOI: 10.1234/5678. URL: dx.doi.org/10.1234/5678"? The redundancy doesn't bother you? And if it's a matter of databases, you know that having redundant information in a database is a source of errors, there should be a single source of truth. – Najib Idrissi Jul 13 '20 at 12:27
• No, I am not happy with an entry displayed like that. But in my view it is the job of the bibstyle to display only one of them, not of the database. I agree with you on the point of the "single source of truth", though. – Federico Poloni Jul 13 '20 at 12:30

Always do the easy bits first, and check them once at the end.

It is tempting to spend a lot of time crafting ones words or getting something just so, and then going back and revising it. More time efficient is to meta-write, e.g. "*** Find a better way to organize these three definitions" , which is not the literal text but a command to yourself to process that section later. This is a way of breaking up the hard parts of writing into manageable pieces and identify those few parts of the paper that really need the time spent on them. Of course, one goal is to replace every metatext piece with the desired text. And then, do only two or three final passes for catching typos that you missed correcting while writing.

• For the meta texts in LaTeX one could use tools like github.com/sunggnus/sfsimpletodo to make them more visible in your draft – AndreasS Jul 12 '20 at 8:30
• The todonotes package is perfect for this as todo's are highlighted. Moreover, you can easily display a list of open todos, which gives a good overview about the open points. – Tobias Diez Jul 12 '20 at 16:28

SyncTeX. SyncTeX is something that can be used to jump quickly from the LaTeX source to the corresponding location in the PDF file and vice versa. So for example if you are editing a paragraph in LaTeX and you want to see how it actually look, you press a shortcut or something and your PDF reader takes you to the paragraph, or you are rereading your paper and you want to edit a paragraph, you double click on it or something and your editor takes you directly to the emplacement of the paragraph in the source.

I have found this extremely useful but it requires some amount of configuration: both your editor and your PDF reader need to support it. One basic thing you need to do is pass the --synctex=1 to latex so that it produces the appropriate .synctex.gz file. After that, due to the large variation of possible editors/PDF viewers, I can't give you specifics. If you want to look up online how to do it for your editor/viewer, note that it is sometimes called "forward/inverse search".

You can take a look at how I did it for Emacs (look for the "source-correlate" options).

latexmk. If you are not using an editor/IDE that manages compilation for you, you should definitely use latexmk. This is a script that automatically calls (pdf/xe/lua)latex, bibtex, biber... as many times as needed. It's as simple as launching latexmk -pdf article and it will do its magic. It reads the output of latex and checks if external files have been modified.

The script also has a "watch" mode (-pvc option), where you tell it to compile the article, and recompile it whenever there's a change. Then you can just forget about compilation, modify your article, and check in the PDF reader from time to time. This may not be very convenient if your file takes a long time to compile, though, and there may be some annoying issues if you modify your article when it's in the middle of being compiled.

Many TikZ figures. TikZ has an "externalization" feature. It will automatically copy the figure to an external file and compile it. If the figures doesn't change between runs, it will not recompile the file, saving a lot of time. This is basically an automated version of what is suggested in the OP. You don't even need to change your document: all you need to do is write

\usetikzlibrary{external}
\tikzexternalize


in the preamble of your file, and run latex with the -shell-escape option. For more information, read Chapter 55 of the TikZ manual.

Note: There is currently an issue with tikz-cd, if you use that. You'll have to tweak things a little.

Documentation. LaTeX packages are widely documented. If you have installed e.g. TeX Live in a normal way, you can simply run texdoc <package> in a terminal to get the documentation of the package. No need to search for it on CTAN or anything. So if you'd like to read the TikZ manual I mentioned before, simply run texdoc tikz and go wild!

Large documents. In the same vein (this is probably well known), when you have a very large document, you may want to split it in several files. When you do, use \include rather than \input for the content files. Then, in the preamble, use \includeonly. Only the files specified there will be recompiled and included in the PDF, but \include is smart enough to keep the auxiliary files for the other sub-files so that references and page numbers will still work correctly. More info: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/includeonly

Citing arXiv preprints. This is shameless self-promotion: I wrote a web app to automatically extract .bib information from an arXiv search. I encourage you to read the help before using it. As I explain there, I found issues with all the tools available online, especially when it comes with using BibLaTeX. If you are still using legacy bibliography support, you may run into issues.

Note that I literally started on it three weeks ago so it's not exactly polished (the "DIY" feature is incomplete, too). It's available there: https://a2b.idrissi.eu/

Writing responses to referees & external references. From time to time, you need to write a response to a referee and talk about what you changed in the new version. So for example you need to cite Lemma 3.14 to explain that its hypothesis have to be tweaked or whatever. But since you may be changing other things, the lemma's number may change, and since you cannot use \ref to automatically get the number, you have to track changes down manually. This can get painful quickly.

Fear not! Using a package that provides external references, you can reuse the references from your article in your letter to the editor, and things will automatically work. No need to change your article; just include

\usepackage{nameref,zref-xr}
\zxrsetup{toltxlabel}
\zexternaldocument*{article}[article.pdf]


in your letter, where you replace article by your article's file name. Then you can use \ref{key-lemma} in your letter, compile the article first, then compile the letter, and voilà! The lemma number is correct. If you use hyperref, the reference will even be clickable if <article pdf> is in the same folder as the letter's PDF.

• Just to be clear, neither nameref nor zref-xr is necessary for referencing external documents; if you just want that functionality, xr (or probably xr-hyper) will do. – LSpice Jul 13 '20 at 23:50
• @LSpice Well, neither xr nor xr-hyper are necessary for that functionality either, nameref and zref-xr will do. From what I remember I settled on zref because the links to the external document actually worked. – Najib Idrissi Jul 14 '20 at 5:16
• @LSpice After some tests, I can confirm that xr(-hyper) do not produce hyperlinks to the other document even with some basic configuration (you can try). It's possible that they can be configured to do so, but the lack of documentation for xr-hyper (apart from relatively cryptic comments at the top of the source file) are probably what made me give up when I settled on zref the first time. It's probably good to bear in mind that xr-hyper was written in 1997 and barely updated since, while zref is actively maintained. – Najib Idrissi Jul 14 '20 at 5:42
• Sure, I didn't mean anything against zref. Mainly I meant to mention that (as far as I could see) nameref was just a pleasant addition, not something that directly pertained to your tip as written. – LSpice Jul 14 '20 at 13:50
• @LSpice No, nameref is necessary if you want load both zref-xr and hyperref, otherwise you get a compilation error. I don't know why. (PS: there was a mistake in the "gist" I linked above, the a.tex file should have called hyperref too, of course. Then there is a link in b.dvi but it doesn't work.) – Najib Idrissi Jul 14 '20 at 14:18

I find it very hard to spellcheck LaTeX documents, because so many of the words in the document are technical commands and not actually text. I've had some success with a (Mac OS only) application called Excalibur designed to spell-check LaTex documents. I would be interested if others had suggestions for this as well, though.

• On Linux you can use aspell, which has a build-in option to ignore TeX commands. Usage could be aspell -t -d en_GB_ize main.tex. The -t is the flag to specify TeX mode, -d en_GB_ize would for example specify British spelling with ize (Oxford spelling). Source is man aspell – Daniel Jul 11 '20 at 21:25
• @Daniel: aspell somehow doesn't seem to understand that inline equations are equations. Is there any trick to this? – darij grinberg Jul 12 '20 at 16:58
• I like TeXtidote a lot. It can check spelling, grammar and style. It is based on LanguageTool. – gsa Jul 12 '20 at 20:46
• @Fosco This might be hard to get used to, but there is no central authority for what is "correct English". Like Daniel, I am a British -ize speller, and this is the traditional spelling for OUP publications, and is based on etymology (words with $\zeta$ in the original Greek). British newspapers use -ise, and many British people semi-learnedly claim all -ize spellings are American (wrongly, historically speaking). However, "analyze" is an example of a spelling that is used in American English, for good phonetic reasons, but not in Oxford spelling, because the word "analyse" comes from French. – Robert Furber Jul 12 '20 at 21:33
• a lazy trick is to do the spell check in the compiled pdf document, rather than the latex. I do this in skim on a mac. It is a bit annoying (it thinks some formulas are spelling mistakes, thinks newlines are spelling mistakes, ...) but as a quick and dirty solution it is reasonable. – Geordie Williamson Jul 13 '20 at 7:52

LaTeX:

• When editing LaTeX by hand, I've gotten used to using \begin{align*} and \end{align*} (as opposed to \[ or  or \begin{equation*}) for all equations, even those that only need 1 line. This allows me to easily add another line without having to change the environment. (I wouldn't be surprised if this makes the compilation a bit slower, though.)


• If you print drafts frequently, put \today (this yields the date of compilation) and \thepage (this yields the page number) on the header (or footer) of each page. This way, even if your papers get jumbled, you will always be able to get them back in order.

• You might find it useful to compile your tex files in a temporary folder. That is, instead of running "pdflatex paper.tex", you copy paper.tex, then run pdflatex on that copy (for the necessary number of runs), and finally copy the resulting PDF back into your home folder. (This is best done by script of course.) This way, while pdflatex is running, your existing PDF remains a readable file as opposed to temporarily turning into a construction site (which confuses a bunch of PDF readers).

Literature search:

• Search for sources using both Google and Google Scholar. The former searches more widely, the latter specifically among what Google believes to be academic literature. Some preprints are easier to find using the former, but published sources generally are easier to find using the latter (particularly if they are given in the laconic old-fashioned reference format: e.g., Google Scholar easily finds "H. O. FOULKES, Quart. Oxf, (2), 2, 1951, p. 67-73", while standard Google gives the wrong paper).

• Be in mind that neither Google nor Google Scholar finds papers on Sci-Hub, so you'll often use the former to find out what papers you need, and the latter to get the actual papers. Sci-Hub works best if you provide it with the DOI, not the URL; if you give it the URL, make sure it's the most standard URL you can find for the paper.

• If you're looking for a paper in a conference proceedings volume, Library Genesis might have the volume (search for the authors and the name of the volume, not for the paper itself).

• Reverse citation lookup (i.e., given a paper A, find all works that cite A) is easy these days -- Google Scholar does it (click on "Cited by [number]" under an article you find using Google Scholar), and so do Mathscinet (click on "Citations" to the right of the review) and arXiv (see the "Bibliographic data" under the abstract). You can use reverse citation lookup to (1) discover whether the paper you are reading has gotten updates or corrections, (2) find out whether the question you are answering has already been answered (just try to think what works such an answer would have cited, and use reverse citation lookup on them), and (3) see what people have done with your work.

Version control:

• git has been mentioned as a great way to keep a sane workflow when collaborating. I found git useful even for single-authored papers: It gives me a way to work in parallel on different sets of changes. For example, assume I have a preprint that I want to add a new section to. The section is complicated and I need a week to write it up. During that week, someone else informs me of a typo in the old sections. Using git, I can easily fix that typo and update my preprint without having to include the unfinished new section. This is also useful when you are making a change that you yourself aren't sure is a step in the right direction (so you want to leave yourself the option of tucking it away and returning to the previous version). And of course, git makes it easy to back your stuff up!
1. I have a rather different approach to most posting here. I write my papers in LyX, which uses LaTeX on the backend, but presents a friendlier interface overtop. I feel like I can use less of my brain for writing proper LaTeX, and concentrate more on the mathematics. (Of course, one still needs/wants to remember the basic codes like \alpha, etc, but LyX will automatically handle a fair number of fiddly details.) And that you can immediately see what you are typing (where you are typing it) helps avoid many typos.

There was some discussion about spellchecking. I'll particularly comment that LyX includes a spellchecker, and it straightforwardly underlines unknown words in red, just like any modern word-processor.

A drawback of LyX is that negotiation (more than usual) is needed when writing with coauthors.

2. On managing bibtex, I like the MathSciNet bibtex, which is generally of a reliable quality. No one has yet noticed, but you don't need a MathSciNet subscription to get at the bibtex: you can use the MRLookup interface, which is available from anywhere. It will only return the top three hits of a search, but the interface is simpler than full MathSciNet, and I prefer to use it even from a university IP when I'm looking for something specific.

I use with BibDesk (on macOS) to manage my master bib file.

In addition to regular spell checking, I have found proselint to be extremely helpful for writing texts as a non-native English speaker. It highlights phrases, words and punctuation according to an extensive list of checks (which can be individually enabled/disabled for each paper or project).

Using one of its example texts:

he is very smart
atm machine
we associate together
it's blatantly obvious that this obviously works.
a very unique idea
a more perfect union
the surrounding circumstances
he filled a much-needed gap
To coin a phrase from the movie,


proselint produces the following output:

<stdin>:1:7: weasel_words.very Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. Found once elsewhere.
<stdin>:3:1: garner.redundancy.ras RAS syndrome. Use 'ATM' instead of 'atm machine'.
<stdin>:4:4: redundancy.garner Redundancy. Use 'associate' instead of 'associate together'.
<stdin>:5:6: redundancy.garner Redundancy. Use 'obvious' instead of 'blatantly obvious'.
<stdin>:6:3: uncomparables.misc Comparison of an uncomparable: 'very unique ' is not comparable.
<stdin>:8:5: redundancy.garner Redundancy. Use 'circumstances' instead of 'surrounding circumstances'.
<stdin>:9:14: misc.illogic 'much-needed gap' is illogical.
<stdin>:10:1: cliches.write_good 'To coin a phrase' is a cliché.
<stdin>:10:2: misc.illogic.coin You can't coin an existing phrase. Did you mean 'borrow'?

• This is a very neat idea and it does seem like a good resource, but proselint does not seem to understand mathematics or LaTeX very well, e.g. it just advised me "'contractable' is the preferred spelling." – Arun Debray Jul 16 '20 at 4:18
• That seems to be a problem indeed. In one of proselints issues, combining it with textlint and a LaTeX plugin is recommended, though I haven't used it that way. – rbialon Jul 16 '20 at 7:21

I will focus here on only 1 aspect—library organization:

• Use bibtex and .bib files. True, but one needs an efficient way to produce them—I recommend zotero (or any other similar program, e.g. mendeley) to organize the library.

• This has an added benefit of efficient full text search through all articles that you are using.

• Another benefit is a possibility to extract bib-data from PDF files

• In order to synchronize PDF files in the zotero library among different computers, use Dropbox.

• Zotero is compatible with overleaf (in the case you are using it)

• Furthermore, I have a perl script (bibtexformat) to clean up .bib files and make journal name abbreviations.

• As a reference manager, I can strongly recommend JabRef. It uses bib files natively, so you don't have to export manually (or clean the bibtex code afterwards). Moreover, many convenient features are built-in: doi2bib (or generate from arXiv ID, ISBN, ...), MathSciNet search and completion of already existing papers, automatic full text download and rename of linked files, journal abbreviations, import from browser with one click etc.. – Tobias Diez Jul 12 '20 at 16:37

In terms of backing up documents, I used to send literally everything I write to a friend of mine who would read it and make comments, and in fact I still send almost everything to them even now.

This actually turned out to be useful as some documents which I wanted to read were lost several computers and several years later, but copies still existed in my sent emails. Since I can access my email account on any computer anywhere, this means I always have access to anything I have written in the past: I just click on sent emails and search for it.

I have to admit I'm slightly surprised that other people don't do this and seem to have trouble getting hold of their own articles.

• For the goal of not losing them, consider hosting your papers on Dropbox, version control (such as GitHub, private repos are gratis now) and/or on Overleaf.com (nice in-browser editor with real-time collaboration; can also edit offline with your favourite local editor but may need paid account) – Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin Jul 12 '20 at 12:07

These may be controversial, but in my personal experience...

1. Do not try to use reference managers for managing references. They will get things wrong often enough that you will spend more time tracking down and fixing errors than you will save. They can be great for managing your personal library, though.

2. Split your longer latex files into several sub-files and use \include (for instance: each section of a paper goes into a separate file). This will make collaboriative work much easier since individual sections can now be edited independently. As a bonus, it will take much less scrolling to find the line that you want to edit.

• Interestingly, (2) disagrees with the advice @qwr posted yesterday: "Avoid splitting short documents (such as a journal or conference paper) into multiple files (e.g. introduction.tex, methods.tex, results.tex, conclusions.tex). Such splitting makes it difficult to work perform a number of tasks with your editor …". (Which, of course, doesn't make it wrong—or maybe you disagree about when a paper becomes long!) – LSpice Jul 13 '20 at 23:46
• I don't agree with your point 1. It really depends on your reference manager. If you use one which deals with bib files directly (jabref, ebib...) then there is nothing wrong for them to get, because what they take as input is exactly what bibtex et al will take as input. – Najib Idrissi Jul 15 '20 at 7:29

I suppose that everyone does this: commonly used expressions are typed as macros. For example, \st (such that---remember to include a space afterwords, that is, in plain TeX (I refuse to learn/use LaTeX), \def\st{such that }), \wrt and \Wrt (the latter at the beginning of a sentence), \tfae, and some other commonly used expressions that may be specific to your field, e.g., \Hs for Hilbert space. This saves a surprising amount of time (I think). But overall, I think the best thing is to learn to touch type fluently, especially using the top row of the keyboard.

• you will probably need or want to remove these macros when you submit your LaTeX file to a journal, it interferes with their work flow (I try to avoid these from the beginning, because it complicates collaboration with other authors on the same file) – Carlo Beenakker Jul 11 '20 at 17:34
• Editors with autocomplete can be used to reduce macros. I don't like short macro names, as there is no standard. Moreover, long macro names can be autocompleted, so the length is not really an issue – Per Alexandersson Jul 11 '20 at 18:18
• @CarlBeenaker I've had no problems with submissions to ArXiv; and I don't use LaTeX, so don't submit LaTeX files. I do submit to journals as either plain TeX or AmS-TeX, and these \def s have not been a problem. – David Handelman Jul 11 '20 at 18:46
• I am not the one who downvoted, but I cannot refrain from noting that this suggestion is in contradiction to common best practices for coding (see for instance here). One might argue that things are slightly different for markup languages than for programming languages, but the issues caused by things like "use very brief macros to reduce typing time" (namely reduced readiblity and maintainability of the code) are at least similar. – Jochen Glueck Jul 11 '20 at 22:15
• as an alternative, with the same time-saving benefit but without the portability drawback, a tool such as TextExpander can be trained to automatically expand macros; this goes beyond local abbreviations, you can also use it to expand \eq into $\text{$$[cursor]$$}$ and similar nonlocal abbreviations. – Carlo Beenakker Jul 12 '20 at 10:52