Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Stefan Kottwitz
Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

The second edition of LaTeX Cookbook offers improved and additional examples especially for users in science and academia, with a focus on new packages for creating graphics with LaTeX. This edition also features an additional chapter on ChatGPT use to improve content, streamline code, and automate tasks, thereby saving time. This book is a practical guide to utilizing the capabilities of modern document classes and exploring the functionalities of the newest LaTeX packages. Starting with familiar document types like articles, books, letters, posters, leaflets, and presentations, it contains detailed tutorials for refining text design, adjusting fonts, managing images, creating tables, and optimizing PDFs. It also covers elements such as the bibliography, glossary, and index. You’ll learn to create graphics directly within LaTeX, including diagrams and plots, and explore LaTeX’s application across various fields like mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science. The book’s website offers online compilable code, an example gallery, and supplementary information related to the book, including the author’s LaTeX forum, where you can get personal support. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to optimize productivity through practical demonstrations of effective LaTeX usage in diverse scenarios.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Plotting functions in two dimensions

Function plots are integral in mathematics for visualizing properties such as roots and extreme points. This recipe explores how to create function plots in a coordinate system easily. Let’s plot the polynomial function f(x) = x3 - 5x.

How to do it...

We’ll use the pgfplots package, built on PGF/TikZ. Now, it’s set to plot a function for us. Here’s the step-by-step process:

  1. Start with a document class. We decided on the standalone class for this recipe, which is great for creating single graphics with just a small margin. However, you can choose the article class or another one as well:
    \documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}
  2. Load the pgfplots package:
    \usepackage{pgfplots}
  3. Begin the document and open a tikzpicture environment:
    \begin{document}
      \begin{tikzpicture}
  4. Begin an axis environment with centered axis lines:
        \begin{axis} [axis lines=center]
  5. Call the...