LaTeX tips: eqnarray and detex.

1. Handling equation numbers in the eqnarray environment

If you have an equation array environment and don't want to number certain equations use the \notag command. Thus (click to enlarge),

produces

where an equation number has only been assigned to the second "equation" in the array.

2. The "detex" command

I bumped into this command by chance today. Funny thing was, it was installed by default on both my CentOS box at work, and my Mac OS X which runs BSD. It doesn't preserve formatting, but essentially gets rid of all LaTeX tags.

You say:

detex file.tex

You can then pipe it to a spell check or save it as a simple text file, and do whatever you want with the un-LaTeXed file.

This works well if you have command line spell-checker available on your Unix/Linux system.