Spaces Following Abbreviations, and A Cautionary Tale

# 7 on Reed College's Ten Strange Things You Need to Know about LaTeX says:

• LaTeX will always force a slightly larger space after a period, but with abbreviations like etc., an extra space is incorrect. Place a \ character directly before a period that should not have any space, and put \thinspace directly after. For periods after single letters ( E. coli), LaTeX does not use an extra-large space. Thus, to get et al. and etc., write: et al.\thinspace and etc\.,

Do your own testing.  Limits of typesetting on blogger.com mean I cannot show exactly what my TeXshop version produces, and I suspect it has more specific programming included than is believed by that guide. 



\emph{E. coli} et al. etc.,

     % E. coli et al. etc.,  
     % This line looks best overall.


\emph{E\. coli} et a\l. etc\.,

     % Eċoli et alėtc; 
     % This line has has a "dot-c", a "dot-e", is missing two spaces, and has a squished semi-colon.

\emph{E.\thinspace coli} et al.\thinspace etc.\thinspace,  
     % E. coli et al. etc. ,   
     % E. coli looks best here.  Not enough space after et al.  Obvious space after etc. ,

I think I'll stick with regular spaces unless otherwise indicated by the thesis editing officers.

\usepackage{} -- Caption

\usepackage[hang, small,font=sf,labelfont=bf,up,rm,textfont=it,up]{caption} % Custom captions under/above floats in tables or figures  _NEED REF_

...

hang indicates hanging indent (I think, because I've not found this exact usage indicated in any documentation yet).

small indicates the relative font size.  Something somewhere mentioned that using relative font size is preferable to an absolute font size -- I'm not sure why, and I'm certain that some journals and thesis departments require a particular font size, e.g. 10pt.

font=sf defines the fonts for the labelfont and textfont entirely.
    sf is sans-serif. 

labelfont=bf,up,rm defines the label, number, and separator, e.g. Figure 1:
     They will be (in this case) bold, upright, and Roman.  Roman is the default, however since I defined my captions as sf, rm here makes the labelfont serif.

textfont=it,up defines the font of the caption text, in this case italic and upright.

\emph{emphasized text} vs. \textit{italicized text}

\emph{emphasized text} vs. \textit{italicized text} -- If your captions are already italicized, \textit won't show any effect.  \emph can be nested such that an emphasized phrase within an italicized phrase will look like this. 
_NEED REF_

\usepackage{} -- Font Colors (for Drafts)

% Package(s) for drafts; for printing font colors (used for printing notes in drafts).

\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames,svgnames,table]{xcolor} % to add comments in color, offers more colors than \usepackage{color} 

     % http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Colors#Adding_the_color_package defines the [options]

     % Use this in the form of {\color{declared-color} some text}, because this "environment allows the text to run over multiple lines and other text environments."
     % Predefined colors -- note that at least in my experience, colors must be capitalized as they are in this list, e.g., OliveGreen, not olivegreen.