Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By : Kottwitz
Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By: Kottwitz

Overview of this book

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting software and is very popular, especially among scientists. Its programming language gives you full control over every aspect of your documents, no matter how complex they are. LaTeX's huge amount of customizable templates and supporting packages cover most aspects of writing with embedded typographic expertise. With this book you will learn to leverage the capabilities of the latest document classes and explore the functionalities of the newest packages. The book starts with examples of common document types. It provides you with samples for tuning text design, using fonts, embedding images, and creating legible tables. Common document parts such as the bibliography, glossary, and index are covered, with LaTeX's modern approach.You will learn how to create excellent graphics directly within LaTeX, including diagrams and plots quickly and easily. Finally, you will discover how to use the new engines XeTeX and LuaTeX for advanced programming and calculating with LaTeX. The example-driven approach of this book is sure to increase your productivity.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Introduction


A picture is worth a thousand words. By presenting a single image, you can visualize a complex concept so that it becomes much easier to understand. Especially using diagrams, you can distill relevant information, and, for example, show relationships and processing orders or compare quantities.

This chapter mainly contains recipes for several kinds of diagram. We will start with simple diagrams and trees, then we will produce charts from data, finally we will build diagrams about concepts and events over time.

All the recipes in this chapter are based on pgf/TikZ, which is an enormously capable graphics package. PGF stands for Portable Graphics Format, which is the backend. TikZ is the frontend. The name is an abbreviation of TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm, which translates to "TikZ is not a drawing program". This recursive acronym, created in the tradition of GNU, should tell potential users what to expect: no WYSIWYG. This means that you cannot see the output during creation...