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)

Coloring our documents

We could enhance our text further with colors. We haven't dealt with it yet, because most people use LaTeX to write serious books and articles or business letters where too much color may harm the appearance. But why not try something fancy? For instance, diagrams and tables in presentations are often colorful.

We just need to load the xcolor package:

\usepackage{xcolor}

From now on, we have to use a command to set the text color:

\color{name} 

This command is a declaration that switches to the color that is named. Just try \color{blue}.

The corresponding command form to color a piece of text is as follows:

\textcolor{name}{text}

\textcolor adds grouping implicitly; it works like this:

{\color{name} text}

For coloring text snippets, \textcolor is the better choice, while \color would be a good choice for longer pieces of text enclosed by an environment or braces.

The xcolor package offers a lot of ready-mixed colors; you...