Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

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)
LaTeX
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
Index

Writing basic formulas


LaTeX knows three general modes:

  • The paragraph mode: The text is typeset as a sequence of words in lines, paragraphs, and pages. That's what we used until now.

  • The left-to-right mode: The text is also considered to be a sequence of words, but LaTeX typesets it from left to right without breaking the line. For instance, the argument of \mbox will be typeset in this mode; that's why \mbox prevents hyphenation.

  • The math mode: Letters are treated as math symbols. That's why they're typeset in italic shape, which is common for variables. A lot of symbols can be used, most of them exclusively in this mode. Such symbols are roots, sum signs, relation signs, math accents, arrows, and various delimiters like brackets and braces. Space characters between letters and symbols are ignored. Instead, the spacing depends on the type of symbols—distances to relation signs are different from distances to opening or closing delimiters. This mode is required for all math expressions...