Working with Large Projects
When writing large documents like theses, books, or research papers, LaTeX provides tools to manage structure, references, indexes, and glossaries. These features help keep the document organized and easy to navigate.
Splitting Documents
Instead of writing everything in one file, you can split a large project into smaller files for each chapter or section. Use \input for lightweight inclusion and \include for larger sections (which also allows selective compilation with \includeonly).
Table of Contents
LaTeX can automatically generate a table of contents (TOC) based on sectioning commands. You simply insert \tableofcontents where you want it to appear.
List of Figures and Tables
Similar to the TOC, you can generate a list of figures and a list of tables automatically. Captions are used to create entries in these lists.
Index Creation
An index helps readers quickly locate topics. To use indexing, load the makeidx package, mark entries with \index, and generate the index with \printindex. You will need to run `makeindex` as an extra compilation step.
Glossaries
The glossaries package lets you define terms and acronyms, and automatically generate a glossary section. Like indexing, it requires extra compilation (using `makeglossaries`).