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)

Using standard font commands

Before we start, let’s look at some standard LaTeX commands to switch between fonts. Experienced LaTeX users can skip this section. We will keep this very short, as other introductory texts usually cover font commands in detail. Specifically, the LaTeX Beginner’s Guide covers fonts in Chapter 10, Using Fonts, which is an excellent place to start.

Fonts for text have five main attributes:

  • Family: This denotes the style of a font, whether it has serifs or not, and whether it’s proportional or monospaced. The latter is also called the typewriter style. You can switch to a family using one of these commands:
    • \rmfamily: This switches to a Roman font, where the characters have serifs. It is the default font family.
    • \sffamily: This command changes to a sans-serif font.
    • \ttfamily: This switches to a typewriter font.
  • Encoding: We covered this in the previous chapter and concluded that T1 encoding is usually a good choice for common...