technical writing

Need a quick diagram for the paper you’re working on? Instead of this: \begin{figure} \vspace{0.5in} Remember to put a diagram here! \vspace{0.5in} \caption{The to-be-written awesome caption will go here.} \label{fig:now-its-all-clear} \end{figure} what if you could quickly turn a whiteboard sketch into a diagram suitable for use as a draft — and maybe even for use in a camera-ready, depending upon your drawing skills — in your paper?

There are many minor utilities that make my life easier when I’m preparing manuscripts in LaTeX. Among them: latexpand is a Perl script that can perform various pre-submission tasks. I frequently use it to expand \input and \include directives, and to remove comments.