What packages do people load by default in LaTeX?

Question

I'm getting the impression from reading the answers written by some of the real experts here that there are quite a few little packages that just tweak LaTeX2e's default behaviour a little to make it more sensible here and there.

Rather than try to pick these up one by one as I read answers to questions (and thus risk missing them), I thought I'd ask up front what LaTeX2e packages people load by default in (almost) every document.

As this is a "big list" question, I'm making it CW. I don't know if there are standard rules across all SE/SO sites for such questions, but on MathOverflow the rule is generally: one thing (in this case, package) per answer. I guess that if a couple of packages really do go together then it would be fine to group them.

This is perhaps a little subjective and a little close to the line, so I'll not be offended if it gets closed or voted down! (But please explain why in the comments.)

Also see our community poll question: “I have used the following packages / classes”

Answer 1

As long as this list is, minted is missing. For code syntax highlighting it works really well and includes the long list of languages of pygments. The pieces of code end up looking like this:

\begin{minted}{language}  
code
\end{minted}

In Beamer it requires frames to be marked as [fragile], and it takes some skill to set it up on Windows. But the results are well worth the effort.

Answer 2

For papers on the arXiv (maths, physics and computer science mostly) there's a list of packages sorted by frequency of use.

The top twenty packages are:

1. article
2. graphicx
3. amssymb
4. amsmath
5. revtex
6. revtex4
7. epsfig
8. amsfonts
9. bm
10. latexsym
11. amsart
12. dcolumn
13. amsthm
14. graphics
15. aastex
16. amscd
17. epsf
18. color
19. aa
20. times

Answer 3

This has been mentioned in some of the “big answers”, but thought it deserved special attention. Probably most documents should include:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

This is to resolve some deficiencies and inconsistencies of the default OT1 font encoding; while improving the support of special characters (e.g. the ability to copy&paste from the generated pdf document).

Answer 4

Another package I use is float. It allows for the placement H for floats, which is somewhat equivalent to h!, but a bit stronger, making sure the figure or table goes exactly where I want it to be.

Answer 5

pageslts: for being able to refer to the last page of a document

Answer 6

\usepackage{fancyvrb}

I use it for highly customisable verbatim. The abstract of the package documentation reads:

This package provides very sophisticated facilities for reading and writing verbatim TeX code. Users can perform common tasks like changing font family and size, numbering lines, framing code examples, colouring text and conditionally processing text.

Here's an example using the SaveVerbatim environment in combination with the \fcolorbox command:

Answer 7

For citations and bibliographies, biblatex is the package of my choice. Key points:

• biblatex includes a wide variety of built-in citation/bibliography styles (numeric, alphabetic, author-year, author-title, verbose [full in-text-citations], with numerous variants for each one). A number of custom styles have been published.

• Modifications of the built-in or custom styles can be accomplished using LaTeX macros instead of having to resort to the BibTeX programming language.

• biblatex offers well-nigh every feature of other bibliography-related LaTeX packages (e.g. multiple/subdivided bibliographies, sorted/compressed citations, entry sets, ibidem functionality, back references). If a feature is not included, chances are high it is on the package authors' to-do list.

• The babel package is supported, and biblatex comes with localization files for about a dozen languages (with the list still growing).

• Although the current version of biblatex (2.4) still allows to use BibTeX as a database backend, by default it cooperates with Biber which supports bibliographies using Unicode. Biber (currently at version 1.4) is included in TeX Live and MiKTeX. Many features introduced since biblatex 1.1 (e.g., advanced name disambiguation, smart crossref data inheritance, configurable sorting schemes, dynamic datasource modification) are "Biber only".

Answer 8

I usually use \relsize package. It's easy to use it. It changes the font size of part of your text. Just type \relsize{x} where x is the number of steps you want to move through the hierarchy of font sizes.

Answer 9

I almost always use the enumitem package, which makes it much easier to make modifications to lists (especially enumerate lists). Most notably, changing the labels to something like (i), (ii), (iii) [no period] with this package is as easy as

\begin{enumerate}[label=(\roman*)]
    \item The first item
    \item The second item
\end{enumerate}

Furthermore, the code above will automatically get nesting right. Before I started using this package, my preamble always included the awkward macro (necessary to change the references and eliminate the extra period in the list itself)

\newcommand{\setenumroman}{%
    \renewcommand{\theenumi}{(\roman{enumi})}%
    \renewcommand{\labelenumi}{\theenumi}%
}

which would break if I ever used it for a nested list (all the enumis would have to be changed to enumiis, if I understand correctly).

The enumitem package is quite flexible; another option I sometimes use is [wide], which makes a list look like part of the body of the text (with numbers/labels at the beginning of relevant paragraphs).

Answer 10

I also find package lipsum fun to use. It lets you generate several versions of lorem ipsum placeholder text to see what your document would look like.

Answer 11

For the natural scientists among us, the package mhchem makes it very easy to typeset chemical symbols and chemical equations.

Answer 12

I always load the package xy to produce diagrams.

Also tikz to draw figures.

Answer 13

Very often a requirement for the documents I write is that the font should be Times (or Times New Roman), so the package I use to set the main roman font to Times and acceptable math is mathptmx.

Recently, I have experimented with newtxtext and newtxmath but, personally, I do not like the design of some symbols and there are a few cases where the spacing between characters is too tight.

For personal use I set the font to New Century Schoolbook and Fourier (for math) with the fouriernc package.

Answer 14

One package that’s really general purpose is nag: It doesn’t do anything, per se, it just warns when you accidentally use deprecated LaTeX constructs from l2tabu (in German) (in English).

From the documentation:

Old habits die hard. All the same, there are commands, classes and packages which are outdated and superseded. nag provides routines to warn the user about the use of those. As an example, we provide an extension that detects many of the “sins” described in l2tabu.

Therefore, I now always have the following in my header (before the \documentclass, thanks qbi):

\RequirePackage[l2tabu, orthodox]{nag}

It’s a bit like having use strict; in Perl: a useful best practice.

Answer 15

I always use

\usepackage[retainorgcmds]{IEEEtrantools} % sophisticated equation arrays

It offers a sophisticated environment for formatting equation arrays,IEEEeqnarray and also offers a few other constructions. I don't use the traditional eqnarrays any more. I usually set the option [retainorgcmds] because it prevents the package from overwriting the itemize, enumerate and description definitions.

Check out How to Typeset Equations in LaTeX. The author gives some good examples of how and why to use this package instead of the traditional ones. The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2ε also mentions the package in section 3.5.2. This section actually seems to be a copy of the first link ;)

Answer 16

\usepackage{fixltx2e} fixes a few things in the LaTeX2e kernel.

Due to LaTeX's stability policy, these corrections have not (yet?) been incorporated into the LaTeX kernel, but this package does things most people would agree are bugfixes. So to load this package is always recommended for newly created documents. The corrections have no commonalities, but the package's description has a nice summary:

• ensure one-column floats don't get ahead of two-column floats;
• correct page headers in twocolumn documents;
• stop spaces disappearing in moving arguments;
• allowing \fnysmbol to use text symbols;
• allow the first word after a float to hyphenate;
• \emph can produce caps/small caps text;
• bugs in \setlength and flushbottom.

Answer 17

The following command before the \documentclass command permits Computer Modern fonts at arbitrary sizes: \RequirePackage{fix-cm}.

Answer 18

Edited by doncherry: Removed packages mentioned in separate answers.

The complete header Part of my header for most of my documents looks as follows:

\documentclass[ngerman,draft,parskip=half*,twoside]{scrreprt}
\usepackage{ifthen}

For some things I need if-then-constructs. This package provides an easy way to realise it.

\usepackage{index}

For generating an index.

\usepackage{xcolor}

xcolor is needed by several packages. For some historical reason I load it manually.

\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{nicefrac}

nicefrac allows typesetting fractions like 1/2. It is sometimes more readable than \frac.

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[intlimits,leqno]{amsmath}
\usepackage[all,warning]{onlyamsmath}

This package warns if non-amsmath-environments are used.

\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{fixmath}

Provides ISO conform greek letters.

\usepackage[euro]{isonums}

Defines comma as decimal delimiter.

\usepackage[amsmath,thmmarks,hyperref]{ntheorem}

for Theorems, definitions and stuff.

\usepackage{paralist}

Improves enumerate and itemize. Also provides some compact environments.

\usepackage{svn}

I work with VCS and svn displays some informations (keywords) from SVN.

\usepackage{ellipsis}

corrects \dots

\DeclarePairedDelimiter{\abs}{\lvert}{\rvert}
\DeclarePairedDelimiter{\norm}{\lVert}{\rVert}

These are the definitions for absolute value and norm.

\SVN $LastChangedRevision$
\SVN $LastChangedDate$

Answer 19

I almost always load microtype. It plays with spacing and the extent to which text protrudes into the right hand margin in a way that yields results that look better, that have fewer instances of hyphenation, and fewer overfull hboxes. It doesn't work with latex, you have to use pdflatex instead. Be sure to load it after you load any fonts; it needs to know what fonts are in use at the time that it is loaded.

Answer 20

Edited by doncherry: Removed packages mentioned in separate answers.

I use TeX for a variety of documents: research papers, lectures/tutorials, presentations, miscellaneous documents (some in Japanese). Each of these different uses, requires different packages.

Depending on my mood, I like to use different fonts. A particular nice combination for mathematics papers is

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % better treatment of accented words
\usepackage{eulervm}   % Zapf's Euler fonts
\usepackage{tgpagella} % TeXGyre Pagella fonts

For references,...

\usepackage[notref,notcite]{showkeys} % useful when writing the paper
\usepackage[noadjust]{cite} % [1,2,3,4,5] --> [1-5]  useful in hep-th!
\usepackage{hyperref} % hyperlinks, metadata,...

For lecture notes (again mathematical) I often like to section the document into "lectures" instead of sections and to add some colours to the titles,.... To do this it's useful to use

\usepackage{fancyhdr} % fancy headers
\usepackage{titlesec} % to change how sections are displayed
\usepackage{color}    % to be able to do this in colour

and I also like to decorate using some silly glyphs, for which these fonts are useful:

\usepackage{wasysym,marvosym,pifont}

and also box equations and other things

\usepackage{fancybox,shadow}

I like adding pictures, whence

\usepackage[rflt]{floatflt}
\usepackage{graphicx,subfigure,epic,eepic}

You may want to hide the answers to tutorial exercises, problems,... and this can be achieved with

\usepackage{version,ifthen} % ifthen allows controlling exclusions

I use XeLaTeX for documents containing Japanese, which works better with

\usepackage{fontspec} % makes it very easy to select fonts in XeLaTeX
\usepackage{xunicode} % accents

Answer 21

When I'm writing package documentation using ltxdoc it likes using three columns for the index. I'd prefer two. I fix it with the idxlayout package:

\usepackage[columns=2]{idxlayout}

Answer 22

I can't live without listings --- pretty-printing (colours, formatting and all) algorithms and code is indispensable --- in pretty much any programming languages and dialects under the sun. Plus, I can import a source file directly from the repository, and the latest version will be automatically rendered.

Answer 23

The package xspace lets you define commands that don't eat up whitespace after them. So you can define an abbreviation like

\newcommand{\sA}{\mathcal{A}\xspace}

and then you can type objects of \sA are called widgets instead of objects of \sA\ are called widgets.

Answer 24

\usepackage{siunitx}

siunitx, for typesetting units and especially for the "S" column type, which allows numbers in tables to be easily aligned, e.g. on the decimal marker.

Answer 25

Another essential package combination is

\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{array}

The booktabs package creates much nicer looking tables than the standard latex tables; the array package's ability to create custom columns is invaluable for formatting tabular material on a per-column basis.

Answer 26

\usepackage{docmute}

I use this in my syllabus preparation as I can make each of the subordinate documents fully standalone, yet do a complete compile of everything at once to verify I have all the corrections made.

It does require that all of the preambles are identical.

This then allows me to work only on one course syllabus or schedule or homework assignments with very fast compiles. Also during the semester I can do corrections on individual documents.

My main document preamble is

\documentclass[10pt,letterpaper]{article}
\input{commonpreamble}
\usepackage{docmute}
\begin{document}

And the subordinate documents have this preamble

\documentclass[10pt,letterpaper]{article}
\input{commonpreamble}
\begin{document}

Notice: Only one master document and the \usepackage{docmute} is only in that file.

Also all subordinate document must be only loaded with \input or \include from the main document. Only one level down is allowed.

I keep one copy of the preamble as commonpreamble. And all files are kept in one folder. This system works very well with Texmaker or TexStudio as the structure of the document is always displayed regardless of choosing a "Master Document".

Answer 27

\usepackage{graphicx}

For including figures, rotating or scaling text. I also use the \graphicspath command to specify a subfolder to help organize my figures and so I can easily change between, for example, a set of figures for internal used (with extra info) and final versions for distribution.

Answer 28

\usepackage{mciteplus}

Allows you to combine multiple references: \cite{refa, *refc, *refc, refd} will produce one references with refa, refb, and `refc`` combined (if they are not used independently elsewhere).

Answer 29

To use the palatino font (it's just a nice looking font)

\usepackage[sc]{mathpazo}

Note that the old palatino package is deprecated.

Answer 30

For quickly setting multicolumn text in a single column document, the multicol package is another package that I use all the time.

\usepackage{multicol}