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)

Putting text into a colorful box

You often see important content put into a colored box, a common practice on posters and slides, although it’s also used in other documents. In this recipe, we will put a little text and whole paragraphs into a colored box, including making a title for the box.

How to do it...

We will use the tcolorbox package. It is based on the pgf bundle, so you need to have also that package installed.

We will create a box with the defaults, a titled box with split content, and boxes placed inline that fit the width of the content. Proceed as follows:

  1. Create a small document based on any document class. The article class is a simple choice. Load the blindtext package to generate dummy text. This time, we will use the pangram option to create short pangrams as dummy text. The blindtext package requires the babel package, so we will load it before. We also set English as the language. Furthermore, load the tcolorbox package. So, our base document...