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)

Setting labels and references

To be able to refer to a certain point, we have to mark it with a label. The name of that label will serve us afterward for referencing.

We will now typeset a list of the most used packages for papers, according to a survey on https://latex.org. Through the \label command, we will mark items that we can later refer to with the \ref command, as shown here:

  1. Create a new book document:
    \documentclass{book}
    \begin{document}
  2. Start a chapter and a section, and place a label for this section:
    \chapter{Statistics}
    \section{Most used packages by LaTeX.org users}
    \label{sec:packages}
  3. Continue with some text, including a footnote:
    The Top Five packages, used by LaTeX.org
    members\footnote{according to the 2021 survey on
    LaTeX.org\label{fn:project}}:
  4. Write an enumerated list and put a label on a few items for referring to them:
    \begin{enumerate}
      \item graphicx\label{item:graphicx}
      \item babel
      \item amsmath\label...