By: jenni konrad
I’m using the wonderful MultiMarkdown application to write my honours thesis due for completion later this year. The main reason for using the application is that I wanted a single source authoring environment that I could use to output both HTML and PDF formats.
MultiMarkdown does this neatly by having an option to output HTML and another to output in the LaTeX format. The LaTeX format can then be used to produce a PDF file using the pdflatex command or similar application. The author of MultiMarkdown has also released a number of LaTeX Support files which are used to compile the sample documents into the PDF format can can also be used for other documents, such as my thesis.
In my thesis I needed to include a list of figures and a list of tables immediately after the table of contents and before the main content. This caused me some confusion for a while until I realised that LaTeX is a document markup language and that surely there is a way for LaTeX to build a such lists, especially as it was able to build the table of contents.
Fortunately LaTeX does indeed provide this type of functionality in the form of the listoffigures and listoftables commands. To use these commands:
- Open the
mmd-memoir-begin-doc.tex file
- Scroll down to the bottom of the file, looking for the
tableofcontents command
- Uncomment the two
listoffigures and listoftables commands, or the one that you require, by removing the % at the front of the line
- If you want the lists to be on a page of their own, add the following command on a line by itself before each of the commands
For example in my version of the file the relevant section now looks like this:
tableofcontents
newpage
listoffigures
newpage
listoftables
Oddly it is necessary to run the pdflatex command twice to get the lists to display correctly. The output of the first run will include the headings for the lists, but not the lists themselves. The second run will populate the lists with the appropriate references.
I still have some further customisation to do, in order to include additional content in the frontmatter section of the document, but for now I can focus on actual writing knowing that the required lists will become part of the document.
The “typesetting” photo was uploaded to Flickr by jenni konrad and used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
