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)

Programming with Lua

While LuaTeX comes with numerous more advancements regarding, for example, font support and MetaPost graphics support, we will focus on pure Lua programming in this section to carve out benefits to program and use algorithms.

TeX, primarily a text-processing language, has limited programming capabilities and needs advanced data-handling functionalities. That makes general-purpose programming a challenge. To address this, TeX developers sought a scripting language to add modern programming capabilities. Their strategic choice was Lua, a versatile, lightweight, and highly portable scripting language designed to be embedded in other applications. This decision led to the development of LuaTeX, a new TeX engine that, combined with the LaTeX format, is called LuaLaTeX.

While LuaTeX offers various advancements, including enhanced font and MetaPost support, this recipe uses pure Lua programming to run algorithms directly within our LaTeX document.

Note

Use...