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)

Building lists

We will start with unordered lists that are structured by bullet points. Later in this section, we will deal with ordered lists that are enumerated by numbers or characters, and then we will continue with lists of explained keywords and facts.

Creating a bulleted list

We shall start with the simplest kind of list. It contains just the items without numbers. Each item is marked by a bullet. That way, we can organize a list of key points in a much more readable way compared to a long sentence within text in a paragraph.

Let's create a list of packages that we got to know in the previous chapter. Follow these steps to build a bullet list:

  1. Create a new document with some introduction text:
    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    \section*{Useful packages}
    LaTeX provides several packages for designing the
    layout:
  2. Now write the list, using an itemize environment and \item commands:
    \begin{itemize}
      \item geometry
      \item typearea...