LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

by Stefan Kottwitz
Released October 2021
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781801078658

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Book description

Harness the power of LaTeX and its wide range of features to create professional-looking text, articles, and books with both online and offline capabilities of LaTeX

Key Features

  • Get a hands-on introduction to LaTeX using fully explained examples to advance from beginner to LaTeX professional quickly
  • Write impressive mathematical, scientific, and business papers or theses using LaTeX
  • Explore LaTeX online

Book Description

LaTeX is high-quality open source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. It's a powerful and complex tool with a multitude of features, so getting started can be intimidating. However, once you become comfortable with LaTeX, its capabilities far outweigh any initial challenges, and this book will help you with just that!

The LaTeX Beginner's Guide will make getting started with LaTeX easy. If you are writing mathematical, scientific, or business papers, or have a thesis to write, this is the perfect book for you. With the help of fully explained examples, this book offers a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples that will help you achieve professional-level results in no time. You'll learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements such as bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes, and go on to manage complex documents and use modern PDF features. You'll also get to grips with using macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work.

By the end of this LaTeX book, you'll have learned how to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional-looking tables, include figures, present complex mathematical formulas, manage complex documents, and benefit from modern PDF features.

What you will learn

  • Make the most of LaTeX s powerful features to produce professionally designed texts
  • Download, install, and set up LaTeX and use additional styles, templates, and tools
  • Typeset math formulas and scientific expressions to the highest standards
  • Understand how to include graphics and work with figures and tables
  • Discover professional fonts and modern PDF features
  • Work with book elements such as bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes
  • Typeset documents containing tables, figures, and formulas

Who this book is for

If you are about to write mathematical or scientific papers, seminar handouts, or even plan to write a thesis, this book offers you a fast-paced and practical introduction to LaTeX. School and university students will find this easy-to-follow LaTeX guide helpful, as will mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and humanists. Anybody with high expectations from their software will discover how easy it is to leverage LaTeX's high performance for creating documents.

Table of contents

  1. LaTeX Beginner's Guide
  2. Second Edition
  3. Contributors
  4. About the author
  5. About the reviewers
  6. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the example code files
    5. Conventions used
    6. Get in touch
  7. Chapter 1: Getting Started with LaTeX
    1. Technical requirements
    2. What is LaTeX?
      1. Benefits of LaTeX
      2. Virtues of open source
      3. Separation of form and content
      4. Portability
      5. Protection for your work
      6. How to get started with LaTeX
      7. Approaches to working with LaTeX
    3. Installing and using LaTeX
      1. Installing TeX Live using the net installer wizard
      2. Installing TeX Live offline
      3. Installing TeX Live on other operating systems
      4. Updating TeX Live and installing new packages
      5. Creating our first document
      6. Checking out advanced LaTeX editors
    4. Working with LaTeX online using Overleaf
      1. What Overleaf requires and delivers
      2. Benefits of Overleaf
      3. Caveats of working online
      4. Creating our first document online
      5. Exploring Overleaf
      6. Grammar and language feedback with Writefull
      7. Reviewing and commenting
    5. Accessing documentation
    6. Summary
  8. Chapter 2: Formatting Text and Creating Macros
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Working with logical formatting
      1. Creating a document with a title and heading
      2. Exploring the document structure
      3. Understanding LaTeX commands
      4. Understanding LaTeX environments
    3. Understanding how LaTeX reads our input
      1. Printing out special symbols
    4. Modifying the text fonts
      1. Adjusting the font shape
      2. Choosing the font family
      3. Confining the effect of commands by braces
      4. Exploring font sizes
    5. Creating our own commands
      1. Using macros for simple text
      2. Proper spacing after commands
      3. Creating more universal commands and using arguments
    6. Using boxes to limit the width of paragraphs
      1. Creating a narrow text box
      2. Producing common paragraph boxes
      3. Exploring further features of paragraph boxes
      4. Using mini pages
    7. Breaking lines and paragraphs
      1. Improving hyphenation
      2. Preventing hyphenation
      3. Improving the justification
      4. Breaking lines manually
      5. Exploring line breaking options
      6. Preventing line breaks
    8. Turning off full justification
      1. Creating ragged-right text
      2. Creating ragged-left text
      3. Centering text
      4. Using environments for justification
    9. Displaying quotes
      1. Quoting longer text
    10. Summary
  9. Chapter 3: Designing Pages
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Creating a book with chapters
    3. Defining the margins
    4. Using class options
    5. Designing headers and footers
      1. Understanding page styles
      2. Customizing headers and footers
      3. Using decorative lines in headers or footers
      4. Changing LaTeX's header marks
    6. Using footnotes
      1. Modifying the footnote line
      2. Using packages to expand footnote styles
    7. Breaking pages
    8. Enlarging a page
    9. Changing the line spacing
    10. Creating a table of contents
    11. Summary
  10. Chapter 4: Creating Lists
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Building lists
      1. Creating a bulleted list
      2. Building an enumerated list
      3. Producing a definition list
    3. Customizing lists
      1. Getting compact lists
      2. Choosing bullets and numbering format
      3. Suspending and continuing lists
    4. Summary
  11. Chapter 5: Including Images
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Including an image
      1. Choosing an optimal file type
      2. Scaling an image
      3. Including whole pages
      4. Putting images behind the text
    3. Managing floating images
      1. Understanding placement options
      2. Forcing the output of figures
      3. Limiting floating
      4. Avoiding floating at all
      5. Arranging several images
      6. Letting text flow around images
    4. Summary
  12. Chapter 6: Creating Tables
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Using tab stops to write in columns
    3. Typesetting tables
      1. Drawing lines in tables
      2. Understanding formatting arguments
      3. Increasing the row height
      4. Beautifying tables
      5. Adjusting lengths
      6. Spanning entries over multiple columns
      7. Inserting code column-wise
      8. Spanning entries over multiple rows
    4. Adding captions to tables
      1. Placing captions above
      2. Customizing captions
    5. Using packages for further customizations
      1. Auto-fitting columns to the table width
      2. Generating multi-page tables
      3. Coloring tables
      4. Using landscape orientation
      5. Aligning columns at the decimal point
      6. Handling narrow columns
    6. Summary
  13. Chapter 7: Using Cross-References
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Setting labels and references
      1. Assigning a label
      2. Referring to a label
      3. Referring to a page
    3. Using advanced referencing
      1. Producing intelligent page references
      2. Fine-tuning page references
      3. Referring to page ranges
      4. Using automatic reference names
      5. Combining intelligent references with automatic naming
    4. Referring to labels in other documents
    5. Turning references into hyperlinks
    6. Summary
  14. Chapter 8: Listing Contents and References
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Customizing the table of contents
      1. Adjusting the depth of the TOC
      2. Shortening entries
      3. Adding entries manually
      4. Creating and customizing lists of figures
      5. Creating a list of tables
      6. Using packages for customization
    3. Generating an index
      1. Defining index entries and subentries
      2. Specifying page ranges
      3. Using symbols and macros in the index
      4. Referring to other index entries
      5. Fine-tuning page numbers
      6. Designing the index layout
    4. Creating a bibliography
      1. Using the standard bibliography environment
      2. Using bibliography databases with BibTeX
      3. Looking at the BibTeX entry fields
      4. Referring to Internet resources
      5. Understanding BibTeX entry types
      6. Choosing the bibliography style
      7. Listing references without citing
    5. Changing the headings
    6. Summary
  15. Chapter 9: Writing Math Formulas
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Writing basic formulas
      1. Embedding math expressions within text
      2. Displaying formulas
      3. Numbering equations
      4. Adding subscripts and superscripts
      5. Using operators
      6. Taking roots
      7. Writing fractions
      8. Writing Greek letters
      9. Writing script letters
      10. Producing an ellipsis
      11. Changing the font, style, and size
      12. Customizing displayed formulas
    3. Typesetting multi-line formulas
      1. Numbering rows in multi-line formulas
      2. Inserting text into formulas
    4. Exploring the wealth of math symbols
      1. Binary operation symbols
      2. Binary relation symbols
      3. Inequality relation symbols
      4. Subset and superset symbols
      5. Arrows
      6. Harpoons
      7. Symbols derived from letters
      8. Miscellaneous symbols
      9. Writing units
      10. Variable sized operators
      11. Variable sized delimiters
    5. Building math structures
      1. Creating arrays
      2. Typesetting matrices
      3. Writing binomial coefficients
      4. Underlining and overlining
      5. Setting accents
      6. Putting a symbol above or below another one
      7. Writing theorems and definitions
      8. Further tools for writing mathematics
    6. Summary
  16. Chapter 10: Using Fonts
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Using comprehensive font bundles
      1. Latin Modern – a replacement for the standard font
      2. Kp-Fonts – another extensive set of fonts
    3. Using specific font families
      1. Serif fonts
      2. Sans-serif fonts
      3. Typewriter fonts
      4. Calligraphic fonts
    4. Using arbitrary fonts
      1. Selecting the main font
      2. Selecting multiple font families
    5. Summary
  17. Chapter 11: Developing Large Documents
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Splitting the input
      1. Including small pieces of code
      2. Including bigger parts of a document
      3. Compiling parts of a document
    3. Creating front and back matter
    4. Designing a title page
    5. Working with templates
    6. Summary
  18. Chapter 12: Enhancing Your Documents Further
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Using hyperlinks and bookmarks
      1. Adding hyperlinks
      2. Customizing hyperlinks
      3. Creating hyperlinks manually
      4. Creating bookmarks manually
      5. Using math formulas and special symbols in bookmarks
    3. Designing headings
    4. Coloring our documents
    5. Summary
  19. Chapter 13: Troubleshooting
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding and fixing errors
      1. Handling the preamble and document body
      2. Using commands and environments
      3. Writing math formulas
      4. Working with files
      5. Creating tables and arrays
      6. Working with lists
      7. Working with floating figures and tables
      8. General syntax errors
    3. Handling warnings
      1. Justifying text
      2. Referencing
      3. Choosing fonts
      4. Placing figures and tables
      5. Customizing the document class
    4. Avoiding obsolete classes and packages
    5. General troubleshooting
    6. Summary
  20. Chapter 14: Using Online Resources
    1. Web forums, Q&A sites, and discussion boards
      1. LaTeX.org
      2. TeX and LaTeX on Stack Exchange
      3. Forums in other languages
      4. Usenet groups
    2. Lists of frequently asked questions
    3. Mailing lists
    4. TeX user group sites
      1. The TeX Users Group
      2. DANTE
      3. The LaTeX project
      4. UK TUG – TeX in the United Kingdom
      5. Other local user groups
    5. Websites for LaTeX software and editors
      1. LaTeX distributions
      2. LaTeX editors
      3. CTAN – the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
    6. Graphics galleries
    7. LaTeX blogs
    8. Twitter messages
    9. Summary
    10. Why subscribe?
  21. Other Books You May Enjoy
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Product information

  • Title: LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition
  • Author(s): Stefan Kottwitz
  • Release date: October 2021
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781801078658