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)

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the basics of editing, arranging, and formatting text. Specifically, we covered modifying fonts and styles of text, using commands and declarations with mandatory and optional arguments, and defining our own commands. We also learned how to format a paragraph—including left, right, or fully justified—and we learned about quoting.

Keep in mind that even though we used formatting commands directly in the text while exploring them, it is better to use them inside command definitions in the preamble to allow easy changes for the future. As you progress through the book, you will get to know further useful commands and packages that could improve your previously written commands.

Now that we've learned about the detailed formatting of text, we're ready to enter the next chapter, which deals with the formatting and layout of whole pages, including margin sizes, headers, and footers.