Units
Scientific texts are full of equations and units. Typesetting units in an inconsistent way, is a guaranteed way to raise my blood pressure. An excerpt from a paper that passed my desk:
The LiDAR data was acquired at a rate of 20hz which, given the robot's speed
of 2 $m/s$, corresponds to a measurment every $10cm$.
This wrong on so many levels: (a) wrong casing of the unit Hz, (b) units need to be typeset upright and (c) the spacing in between numbers and their units needs to be consistent. You can avoid all the misery of keeping things correct and consistent by using the siunitx package. You can load it by putting the following in your preamble:
\usepackage{siunitx}
\sisetup{
detect-all,
per-mode = symbol,
mode = math
}
Believe me, it is top quality. The above sentence becomes:
The LiDAR data was acquired at a rate of \qty{20}{\hertz} which, given the robot's speed
of \qty{2}{\meter\per\second}, corresponds to a measurement approximately every $\qty{10}{\centi\meter}$.
The syntax is quite easy. There are a number of most useful macros:
% To typeset a unit (without a number)
\unit{\mega\volt}
% To typeset a quantity with unit
\qty{1}{\micro\meter}
% To typeset a number
\num{10000}
% You can also use engineering notation
\qty{e5}{\pico\farad}\\
\qty{3e8}{\meter\per\second}
You can find the documentation of the package on CTAN online. It also offers properly aligned tables (with numbers aligned on the decimal dots). Check it out!