DEV Community

latexteada
latexteada

Posted on

LaTeX Crossing Referencing: The Idea

Hello hello how are you today? :)

We have learned a lot of stuff in LaTeX, from the most basics like installing the distributions, going through changing font styles to create tables and images, so, we have a lot of knowledge about this topics.

Let's dive more in this LaTeX world

Let's suppose you have written a huge LaTeX document, like 50 pages, full of tables, images, sections, a little bit of this and that. You are currently on page 30 and you notice that you need to reference a table in page 4, how would you do it?
One option is just write ... like the table in page 4 and everything is solved, but, suddenly you need to modify page number 3 and that little modification takes you 3 pages more, so, page 4 is now page 7, it means that you need to change the reference to ... like the table in page 7 but you remember that you need to put more information on page 5 and it takes 4 pages more and ...

Did you catch the idea? Referencing in the static way it is not a good idea, because you do not know what modifications you need to do, or if that would be the last version of your work, there is where Cross Referencing is going to save us because

Cross Referencing is dynamic

This means that if you modify the position of the object (table, image, section, etc) or the number of objects before the object, the number will change automatically, you do not need to be worried about that, LaTeX will do it automatically.

The command for that is \label{} and the command to reference that item is \ref{}

This is just the basic idea of why you would need to use Cross Referencing, next week I am going to talk about it in a deeper way, showing you the power of these commands and some conventions to use them

Do not forget to follow me on twitter @latexteada

Latest comments (0)