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)

Tuning the Text

The previous chapter provided recipes for creating entire documents. You may use them as starting points. Now, we will focus on fine-tuning text elements, such as shaping paragraphs and manipulating, positioning, and arranging text.

This chapter shows recipes for:

  • Improving justification and hyphenation
  • Adding margin notes
  • Converting numbers to words
  • Putting text into a colorful box
  • Visualizing the layout
  • Visualizing boxes of letters and symbols
  • Typesetting in a grid
  • Absolute positioning of text
  • Adding drop caps
  • Fitting text to a shape
  • Creating a pull quote

We will not yet deal with fonts. This topic deserves a whole chapter and will be covered in Chapter 3, Adjusting Fonts.

This chapter will start with some fundamental principles, explore helpful techniques, and conclude with practical recipes that illustrate LaTeX’s capabilities that extend beyond conventional paragraph formatting.