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)

Doing calculations

Besides writing math, sometimes it’s useful to actually calculate something. We have several options:

  • The calc package offers basic math with LaTeX, with lengths and counters
  • The fp package provides fixed-point arithmetic with high precision
  • pgfmath belongs to the PGF/TikZ package, providing many functions and a good parser
  • LuaLaTeX is a version of LaTeX that allows programming calculation in Lua

Here, let’s work with the pgfmath functionality, as we already worked with TikZ, and it’s better documented than the other options.

How to do it...

Follow these steps:

  1. Start a document, load the TikZ package, and begin your document without indentation at the beginning:
    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{tikz}
    \begin{document}
    \noindent
  2. In your text, use the \pgfmathparse command for calculating and the \pgfmathresult command for printing:
    In a right-angled triangle, the two shortest sides
    got widths of 3 and...