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 boxes of letters and symbols

LaTeX utilizes boxes to organize and position text and symbols, whether entire paragraphs or individual letters and symbols. In this recipe, we will closely examine the dimensions of these boxes, the spacing between them, and the resulting dimensions of dynamically adjusted space. This will give us a deeper understanding of typesetting.

In this section, we will use LuaLaTeX. LuaLaTeX is a variant of LaTeX based on the LuaTeX compiler that integrates the Lua scripting language within TeX. It’s a modern alternative to the pdfLaTeX compiler we usually utilize in this book if not mentioned otherwise. In Chapter 11, Using LaTeX in Science and Technology, we will explore Lua programming.

How to do it...

We will additionally load the lua-visual-debug package. Then, we will compile with LuaLaTeX as follows:

  1. Open your document or any sample file. Again, we will use the document from our first recipe in Chapter 1, Exploring Various...