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

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 2

A nice commenting environment is provided by the package:

\usepackage{verbatim}

For debugging purposes I find this package indispensable. Before I found this package I would have to enter % before each line I wished to comment. The environment works as follows:

\begin{comment}
Text in this environment will be ignored by LaTeX.
\end{comment}

The packages

\usepackage{comment}
\usepackage{xcomment}

provide even greater commenting capabilities (i.e. the ability to selectively typeset certain environments) though I personally haven't had much use for these extended features.

Answer 3

I save my documents in an SVN repository. The svn package helps to extract some informations out of the version control system. The document has somewhere a hint what revision number and what date it is. For this you have to set svn keywords and declare in your LaTeX document what you need:

\SVN $LastChangedRevision$
\SVN $LastChangedDate$

Wihtin the document you can refer to that information with \SVNLastChangedRevision and \SVNDate.

Answer 4

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 5

\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 6

Usually I write German texts. We have new and old rules for spelling. The package hyphsubst provides some new hyphenation pattern. That's why I load it in addition to babel:

\RequirePackage[ngerman=ngerman-x-latest]{hyphsubst}

Answer 7

I'm not just feigning surprise when I say I'm shocked that such an incredibly useful package set as xparse/expl3 (the latter is loaded by the former) hasn't been mentioned yet. I invariably find myself typing:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xparse}

to begin a document.

Answer 8

This question assumes you are making a LaTeX document for personal use. If you are planning to submit the document to a journal, it's safer to avoid using too many unusual classes, because they may be incompatible with the journal's LaTeX classes or may be incompatible with the style that the journal will impose on your paper. Very common packages like amsthm are usually safe. (I would leave this as a comment, but I don't have enough reputation yet.)

Answer 9

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 10

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 11

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

Answer 12

\usepackage[scaled=0.8]{luximono} 

which is a fixed-width font which supports boldface. This is useful when typesetting source code.

Answer 13

\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 14

I just discovered the xparse package. It lets you define more flexible macros with more than one optional argument. I used it to make a very general partial derivative function.

\usepackage{xparse}
\DeclareDocumentCommand{\pder}{ O{} O{} m }{\frac{\partial^{#2}#1}{\partial#3^{#2}}}

Example

\pder{x} will give you

\pder[f]{x} will give you

\pder[f][3]{x} will give you

Answer 15

It has been forgotten the excellent tcolorbox package which allows to customize the boxes, to create customized box environments, box commands, backups.

Its possibilities are very great, its doc is about 500 pages long, but since I use it, the writing of my handouts has become much easier.

tcolorbox – Coloured boxes, for LATEX examples and theorems, etc

Answer 16

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 17

When using class book, I always load package emptypage.

It needs no particular skill since it doesn't introduce any new command to use, it removes headers and footers from empty pages at the end of chapters just by adding \usepackage{emptypage} in your preamble.

The default option is odd.

Answer 18

In almost every document I use the csquotes package in combination with babel. The handling of quotations with \enquote{} and the flexibility of changing the way the quotation marks look like is very convenient. See for example, the answer to the question Quotation Mark Pairing.

Answer 19

 \usepackage{etex}

to be able to include e.g. TikZ without strange errors.

UPDATE: not needed with LaTeX releases since 2015 (source: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/186594/1340).

Answer 20

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

Answer 21

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 22

No one mention tabulary.

Sometimes I make tables with multiline cells in several columns, where the total width must be just \textwidth. Use tabular with p{} columns here is a pain since one must take into account \tabcolsep.

For this, the sibling tabularx (cited in another answer) could make a good work ( X columns take all the available space), but often I need columns weighted according to the amount of text rather and with different alignments, but X columns of tabularx share equally that space.

Instead, tabulary allow the use L, C, R and J columns o automatic variable width. Not always a column layouts as LLCRL produce the desired result but since it is possible mix L,C,R columns with basic types (l,r,c,p{}, m{}...) find the best fit (i.e., some like Lcp{5em}RL) is a child play.

Answer 23

I am surprised that nobody mentioned the packages:

• physics which offers numerous commands to make typing of physics equations faster, simpler and equations easier to read. See the docs
• cleveref gives nice commands for easier referencing within the document. Note, this package is to be loaded after hyperref See also the docs

Answer 24

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 25

I always load the package xy to produce diagrams.

Also tikz to draw figures.

Answer 26

I include: \usepackage{outlines} in my preamble. outlines is a quick and easy way to generate hierarchically embedded lists. Especially useful when I'm drafting up a paper (I like to outline it) or if I'm quickly typing up notes, e.g., at a conference.

Answer 27

\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 28

I am using the chemfig and chemmacros packages everyday and they are great for drawing chemical structures and reaction schemes. Both are really good documented and play nice together.

There are also nice third party tools like mol2chemfig for faster structure drawing instead of writing every bond and atom on your own. (example)

Just to mention another package for chemistry, one could also use XyMTex but heterocyclic compounds look quite ugly.

Answer 29

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 30

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