LaTeX issues in abstracts

Experience in editing the book of abstracts for Antalya Algebra Days has brought to light various misunderstandings about LaTeX. The comments below assume that one has \usepackage{amsmath} in the preamble of one's document (so that one has access to the main features of AMS-LaTeX):

• One should italicize words by means of the command \emph{...}, not by putting the words in math-mode with $...$. (Why not? Because the spacing between letters is different in math mode.)
• One should not try to control vertical space with commands like \medskip. Just let blank lines determine paragraph breaks. (The gap between paragraphs is the length parskip, which can be changed with the \setlength command; this is done in our template file, and it is done also with \usepackage{parskip}.)
• To display mathematics, use \[...\] or \begin{equation*}...\end{equation*} (rather than the center environment, for example; if you use \begin{equation}...\end{equation}, then your display will be assigned a number).
• Theorem-like environments can be defined with the \newtheorem command (as in the template).
• If you don't like the counters used with the enumerate environment, you can change them globally, as for example with \renewcommand{\theenumi}{\roman{enumi}} \renewcommand{\labelenumi}{(\theenumi)}.
• If you want references of the form [5, Theorem 1.2], you can get this with \cite[Theorem~1.2]{key5} (where key5 is the key that you have assigned to the 5th item in your bibliography).
• You assign a key to a bibliographic item by entering the item in the bibliography as (for example) \bibitem{key5} Some article.... These bibliographic items are normally in the environment called thebibliography; for more control, this is changed to ourbiblio in the template. So that different people do not assign the same key to different items, you are asked to use your name in your keys. This doesn't mean you should use the expression “yourname” in your keys; just use your actual name (or some other expression unique to you). If the writer of this page were giving a talk, his third bibliographic entry would begin \bibitem{pierce3}....