Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefan Kottwitz
4 (1)
Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

4 (1)
By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 1: Getting Started with LaTeX

You are familiar with word processing software: you type something, and the software prints it as it is on screen. In contrast, LaTeX, as typesetting software, receives instructions and text from you, and then creates the output. It produces high-quality output based on sophisticated algorithms for justification, text alignment, whitespace balancing, figure placement, and more, such as predefined formatting styles for headings and general page layout, which you can customize.

Are you ready to leave those "what you see is what you get" word processors behind and to enter the world of accurate, reliable, and high-quality typesetting? Yes? Then let's go together!

It's great that you decided to learn LaTeX. This book will guide you along the way to help you get the most out of it. Let's speak briefly about LaTeX's benefits and the challenges, and then we shall prepare our tools.

In this chapter, we will get to...