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)

Typesetting tables

We might need more complicated structures and formatting, such as centering in columns, dividing lines, or even nested structures. LaTeX provides the tabular environment for typesetting straightforward and complex tables.

We will now create a table of font family commands as in the previous example, but this time, we would like to make all entries in a column horizontally centered to each other. We will also add some horizontal lines to mark the border and the header of the table by following these steps:

  1. Create a new document. Define a command for setting the font for the head row:
    \documentclass{article} 
    \newcommand{\head}[1]{\textnormal{\textbf{#1}}} 
    \begin{document}
  2. Begin a tabular environment. As a mandatory argument, provide ccc, standing for three centered columns:
    \begin{tabular}{ccc}
  3. Write the table head row, add & to separate column entries, and add \\ to end rows. Use \hline to insert horizontal lines:
      \hline 
     &...