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)

Creating graphs

Graph theory, commonly employed in fields such as operations research and computer science, typically involves models and drawings primarily composed of repeated vertices, edges, and labels. There are LaTeX packages that help efficiently generate consistent graphs.

How to do it...

The tkz-graph package developed by Alain Matthes provides a user-friendly interface, various preconfigured styles, and extensive customization options. Let’s start with a minimal example:

  1. Begin with any document class. In this case, I’ve opted for the standalone class to generate a compact PDF containing the desired image. Additionally, I’ve included an option for a border value to create a slight margin around the graph.
    \documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}
  2. Load the tkz-graph package:
    \usepackage{tkz-graph}
  3. Define the distance between two vertices in cm:
    \SetGraphUnit{3}
  4. Begin the document body:
    \begin{document}
  5. Open a tikzpicture environment...