Paper writing: RefTeX to the rescue!

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Marko Dimjašević

Courtesy of Nic McPhee

Emacs provides a very powerful LaTeX environment for paper writing. I’ve been using it for a while and I’ve been enjoying it. In this post I’ll give a simple example of how a regular-expression search-and-replace can be done in a multifile paper.

Say you have a paper you’ve been writing with a few other researchers. A good practice is to split your paper into several LaTeX files. For example, each paper section can be one file. This is a better paper organization than having everything in a single gigantic LaTeX file. Also, it lets you and your collaborators work on the paper in parallel — you writing an introduction, one collaborator writing about related work, and yet another collaborator adding in results you got, all at the same time. Then you would have a master LaTeX file incorporating all the section files like this:

\input{macros.tex}
\input{abstract.tex}
\input{introduction.tex}
\input{related-work.tex}
\input{background.tex}
\input{approach.tex}
\input{implementation.tex}
\input{evaluation.tex}
\input{conclusion.tex}
\input{acknowledgments.tex}

Next, let’s say the paper is on detecting malicious apps in Android. During the writing of the paper, you’ve been using both “app” and “application” throughout the paper to refer to a smartphone application. Then you realize it’d be better if you used only one of the terms consistently. You go with “application”.

You have several obstacles in making a consistent update to the paper. First, “app” is a prefix of “application”, meaning you have to be careful not to do a dummy search-and-replace and turn “application” into “applicationlication”. Second, you have to take care of capitalization, i.e. you need to replace “App” at the beginning of a sentence with “Application”. Third, you have a multifile document. Will you manually walk through all the files sentence by sentence and watch not to make a mistake?

RefTeX to the rescue! It is an Emacs minor-mode helping you with references, labels, indices, operating multifile documents, etc. All you have to do to properly replace all “app” occurrences with “application” is to run a RefTeX regular-expression command anywhere in the document:

M-x reftex-query-replace-document

Provide <app> for the first argument and application for the second argument. You still might want to walk through all the matches and for example make sure you’re not messing up a figure label. Once you are done, save all the modified paper files by running:

M-x reftex-save-all-document-buffers

If you keep your paper in a version control system repository like Git, you can easily see which files have been affected by the update:

$ git status --short
M acknowledgments.tex
M approach.tex
M background.tex
M evaluation.tex
M implementation.tex