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)

Using comprehensive font bundles

We start with the most extensive font bundles. To test fonts, we may use a pangram. This word has a Greek origin: pan gramma means every letter. It stands for a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. Thus, a pangram is very convenient for displaying fonts.

We will print out a very famous pangram phrase using the Latin Modern font family. Latin Modern is very similar to the default LaTeX font called Computer Modern. However, Latin Modern contains a lot of additional characters, most of them being accented characters. Because of this advantage and its very high quality, we can consider it as the successor to the standard font. Let's see how it looks in various font families and shapes, and with a math formula:

  1. Start a new document:
    \documentclass{article}
  2. Create a macro for the pangram with additional numerals. It will have one argument, which will be our font family or shape selection command. We will add a paragraph break...