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)

Visualizing the layout

When designing a document, obtaining precise information about the dimensions and positioning of layout elements, such as the text body, header, footer, and the space allocated for the margin notes, is often helpful. LaTeX can print helplines for you to examine and finetune the layout.

How to do it...

We will use the showframe package. Take the following steps:

  1. Open your document or any sample for testing. Here, we will use the very first document from Chapter 1, Exploring Various Document Classes.
  2. Add the following line at the end of your preamble:
    \usepackage{showframe}
  3. Compile the document. You can see frames around the text body, the margin note area, the header, and the footer as you can see here:
Figure 2.6 – A page layout overview

Figure 2.6 – A page layout overview

Examining the layout can inspire adjustments, such as modifying the margins or other page dimensions. When you no longer need these helplines, you can deactivate the...