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LaTeX Beginner's Guide

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

4.6 (20)
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LaTeX Beginner's Guide

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

4.6 (20)

Overview of this book

LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you. LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand. This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
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LaTeX
LaTeX
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with LaTeX
Getting Started with LaTeX
What is LaTeX?
Installing LaTeX
Time for action – installing TeX Live using the net installer wizard
Time for action – installing TeX Live offline
Creating our first document
Time for action – writing our first document with TeXworks
Summary
2
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
chevron up
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
Understanding logical formatting
Time for action – titling your document
How LaTeX reads your input
Time for action – trying out the effect of spaces, line breaks, and empty lines
Time for action – writing special characters in our text
Formatting text – fonts, shapes, and styles
Time for action – tuning the font shape
Time for action – switching to sans-serif and to typewriter fonts
Time for action – switching the font family
Time for action – exploring grouping by braces
Time for action – exploring font sizes
Time for action – using an environment to adjust the font size
Saving time and effort – creating your own commands
Time for action – creating our first command using it as anabbreviation
Time for action – adding intelligent spacing to command output
Time for action – creating a macro for formatting keywords
Time for action – marking keywords with optional formatting
Using boxes to limit the width of paragraphs
Time for action – creating a narrow text column
Time for action – using the minipage environment
Breaking lines and paragraphs
Time for action – stating division points for words
Time for action – using microtype
Time for action – using line breaks
Exploring the fine details
Time for action – exploring ligatures
Time for action – using differently spaced dots
Time for action – comparing dots to ellipsis
Time for action – experimenting with accents
Time for action – using accents directly
Turning off full justification
Time for action – justifying a paragraph to the left
Time for action – centering a title
Time for action – centering verses
Displaying quotes
Time for action – quoting a scientist
Time for action – quoting TeX's benefits
Time for action – spacing between paragraphs instead of indentation
Summary
3
Designing Pages
Designing Pages
Defining the overall layout
Time for action – writing a book with chapters
Time for action – specifying margins
Time for action – finding the geometry package manual
Time for action – increasing line spacing
Using class options to configure the document style
Time for action – creating a two-column landscape document
Creating a table of contents
Time for action – adding a table of contents
Time for action – shortening the table of content entries
Designing headers and footers
Time for action – customizing headers with the fancyhdr package
Breaking pages
Time for action – inserting page breaks
Enlarging a page
Time for action – sparing an almost empty page
Using footnotes
Time for action – using footnotes in text and in headings
Time for action – redefining the footnote line
Summary
4
Creating Lists
Creating Lists
Building a bulleted list
Time for action – listing LaTeX packages
Time for action – listing packages by topic
Creating a numbered list
Time for action – writing a step-by-step tutorial
Customizing lists
Time for action – shrinking our tutorial
Time for action – modifying lists using enumitem
Producing a definition list
Time for action – explaining capabilities of packages
Summary
5
Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures
Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures
Writing in columns
Time for action – lining up information using the tabbing environment
Time for action – lining up font commands
Typesetting tables
Time for action – building a table of font family commands
Time for action – adding nicer horizontal lines with the booktabs package
Time for action – merging cells
Time for action – using the array package
Time for action – merging cells using the multirow package
Time for action – adding a caption to our font table
Inserting pictures
Time for action – including a picture
Managing floating environments
Time for action – letting a figure float
Time for action – embedding a picture within text
Summary
6
Cross-Referencing
Cross-Referencing
Setting labels and referencing
Time for action – referencing items of a top list
Producing intelligent page references
Time for action – introducing variable references
Time for action – referring cleverly
Summary
7
Listing Content and References
Listing Content and References
Customizing the table of contents
Time for action – refining an extensive table of contents
Creating and customizing lists of figures
Time for action – creating a list of diagrams
Creating a list of tables
Using packages for customization
Generating an index
Time for action – marking words and building the index
Creating a bibliography
Time for action – citing texts and listing the references
Time for action – creating and using a BibTeX database
Changing the headings
Summary
8
Typing Math Formulas
Typing Math Formulas
Writing basic formulas
Time for action – discussing quadratic equations and roots
Customizing displayed formulas
Time for action – typesetting multi-line formulas
Fine-tuning formulas
Building math structures
Stacking expressions
Writing theorems and definitions
Summary
9
Using Fonts
Using Fonts
Preparing the encoding
Time for action – directly using special characters
Installing additional fonts
Choosing the main font
Time for action – comparing Computer Modern to Latin Modern
Exploring the world of LaTeX fonts
Summary
10
Developing Large Documents
Developing Large Documents
Splitting the input
Time for action – swapping out preamble and chapter contents
Creating front and back matter
Time for action – adding a dedication and an appendix
Designing a title page
Time for action – creating a title page
Working with templates
Time for action – starting with a template
Summary
11
Enhancing Your Documents Further
Enhancing Your Documents Further
Using hyperlinks and bookmarks
Time for action – adding hyperlinks
Time for action – customizing the hyperlink appearance
Time for action – editing PDF metadata
Benefitting from other packages
Time for action – visiting the TeX Catalogue Online
Time for action – installing a LaTeX package
Designing headings
Time for action – designing chapter and section headings
Coloring your document
Summary
12
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting
Understanding and fixing errors
Time for action – interpreting and fixing an error
Handling warnings
Time for action – emphasizing on a sans-serif font
Avoiding obsolete classes and packages
General troubleshooting
Summary
13
Using Online Resources
Using Online Resources
Web forums, discussion boards, and Q&A sites
Time for action – asking a question online
Frequently Asked Questions
Mailing lists
TeX user group sites
Homepages of LaTeX software and editors
LaTeX archives and catalogs
Friends of LaTeX
LaTeX blogs
Summary
Pop Quiz Answers
Pop Quiz Answers
Chapter 2: Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
Chapter 3: Designing Pages
Chapter 4: Creating Lists
Chapter 5: Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures
Chapter 6: Cross-Referencing
Chapter 7: Listing Content and References
Chapter 8: Typing Math Formulas
Chapter 9: Using Fonts
Chapter 10: Developing Large Documents
Chapter 11: Enhancing Your Documents Further
Chapter 12: Troubleshooting
Index
Index

Time for action – using microtype

We will improve our previous example by loading the microtype package :

  1. Insert the following line into the preamble of the previous example:

    \usepackage{microtype}

  2. Typeset and look at the output:

What just happened?

We have loaded the microtype package without any options, relying on its default behavior. It introduces font expansion to tweak the justification and uses hanging punctuation to improve the optical appearance of the margins. This may reduce the need of hyphenation and improves the "grayness" of the output. You've seen its effect on a narrow column—imagine the improvement on wide text—keep that in mind and try it out later!

Though microtype provides powerful features and options for the advanced typesetter, we usually won't need to do more than just load it to profit from it. There's an extensive package documentation if you want to study it in depth.

microtype does nice tweaking, but it's not a cure-all; we should still take care of proper hyphenation...

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