Finally

After neglecting way too much in my life, I’ve finally defended my thesis. Being in the process of making final corrections, I thought I’d post here a couple of tricks I discovered along the way for the list of abbreviations and the list of symbols. If you’re using latex and (for abbreviations) linux, read on.

List of abbreviations

Took an afternoon, but I remembered how to use grep and sed long enough to craft this little bit of regexp voodoo.

sed -r input.tex ‘s/([a-z]{0,1}[A-Z]{2,})/\n\1\n/g’ | egrep ‘[a-z]{0,1}[A-Z]{2,}’ > output

It’ll catch the acronyms of the form AAAAA or aAAAAA (with obviously any number of As) as well stuff you write in all caps. It also obviously spits out all the acronyms in the order they appear without sorting them nor eliminating doubles. Took me 1.5 hours to do that, figured I didn’t really want to bother with writing a perl script.

List of symbols and variables

I’m stuck doing it by hand, although I found there was a way to automate the list of symbols. Unfortunately it requires some thinking ahead I didn’t do and it would probably take just as long to do it either way now. See here.

Enjoy and happy thesis writing if you’re going through the process as well.