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)

Drawing molecular orbital diagrams and atomic orbitals

A molecular orbital (MO) diagram describes chemical bonding in molecules and displays energy levels. First, we will create such an MO diagram, and then we will draw atomic orbitals with a more visual approach.

How to do it...

We will use the tikzorbital package written by Germain Salvato-Vallverdu. These are the steps:

  1. Start with any document class; we choose the standalone class here. Then load the tikzorbital package that implicitly loads TikZ:
    \documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}
    \usepackage{tikzorbital}
  2. Load the positioning and quotes TikZ libraries and begin the document:
    \usetikzlibrary{positioning,quotes}
    \begin{document}
  3. Open a tikzpicture environment, and define a custom ^ style to get small, center-aligned sans-serif text where we want it:
    \begin{tikzpicture}[note/.style =
      {align = center, font = \sffamily\scriptsize}]
  4. Use the \drawLevel command to draw an energy level line, that...