When I was a PhD stu­dent, I found I needed a lot of LaTeX func­tion­al­ity that did not then exist. So I wrote my own pack­age which has served me well for about 20 years. It is called HyTeX.sty (the name being a shame­less take-​​off of LaTeX from Leslie Lamport as well as a homonym of High-​​Tech). The advan­tage of hav­ing my own pack­age is that almost every file starts with

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hytex}
\begin{document}

All the other pack­ages that I use are called from within HyTeX.sty.

After 20 years of using HyTeX, I’ve decided it is time to put it to rest. Most of the func­tion­al­ity in the pack­age is now avail­able in pack­ages on CTAN, and usu­ally with more fea­tures and facil­i­ties. Fur­ther, when I work with coau­thors, I need to send them the lat­est ver­sion of HyTeX as well (as I revise it from time to time).

So from now on, I’m only using pack­ages from CTAN. These are auto­mat­i­cally avail­able to all my coau­thors so we don’t have any issue with dif­fer­ent ver­sions (pro­vided they keep their TeX imple­men­ta­tion up to date!).

An imme­di­ate con­se­quence of this is that I need to replace my stan­dard pre­am­ble. After exper­i­ment­ing a lit­tle, here is what I am now using:

\usepackage{graphicx,hyperref,amsmath,natbib,bm,url}
\usepackage{microtype,todonotes}
\usepackage[australian]{babel}
\usepackage[a4paper,text={16.5cm,25.2cm},centering]{geometry}
\usepackage[compact,small]{titlesec}
\setlength{\parskip}{1.2ex}
\setlength{\parindent}{0em}
\clubpenalty = 10000
\widowpenalty = 10000
\usepackage{kpfonts}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

A few words of expla­na­tion may be in order.

• The first line loads a lot of stan­dard pack­ages that I use all the time.
• The latex default page size is awful, so I load geom­e­try to set up the page to some­thing more sensible.
• The latex default sec­tion head­ings seem too large and too widely spaced to me, hence the use of titlesec. This pack­age also allows me to do a lot of addi­tional fine-​​tuning if required.
• I pre­fer para­graphs with spaces between them and no inden­ta­tion; this is achieved by set­ting the lengths of \parskip and \parindent accordingly.
• The set­tings for \clubpenalty and \widowpenalty pre­vent orphans and wid­ows.
• One of my pet peeves is the US date for­mat “March 21, 2010″ which seems to me to be in the wrong order. I pre­fer “21 March 2010″ so that the time units increase in size: day month year. I fix this using the babel pack­age with the australian option.
• Finally, I am sick of the stan­dard LaTeX font “Com­puter Mod­ern Roman”. It’s actu­ally a very good font, but it is used so much I find it tire­some. So I’m using kpfonts instead which includes a com­plete set of fea­tures includ­ing math­e­mat­ics as well as non-​​math char­ac­ters and looks a lit­tle more inter­est­ing with­out being distracting.

I’d be inter­ested to know how this pre­am­ble com­pares with the stan­dard pre­am­bles used by other LaTeX­ers.

Related Posts:

• Squeez­ing space with LaTeX
• Get­ting started with XeLaTeX
• Index­ing in LaTeX
• Use­ful LaTeX links
• Tables in LaTeX