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)

Creating Tables

In this chapter, you will find recipes for crafting aesthetically pleasing tables. Specifically, this chapter covers the following topics:

  • Designing a legible table
  • Positioning tables
  • Merging cells
  • Splitting a cell diagonally
  • Adding footnotes to a table
  • Aligning numeric data
  • Coloring a table
  • Importing data from an external file

With LaTeX, we can create and print complex tables. In this chapter, we will first focus on achieving good readability. We will then continue to explore helpful design elements.

We assume you know the basics of tabular environments from an introduction to LaTeX such as LaTeX Beginner’s Guide, Second Edition, Packt Publishing, Chapter 6, Creating Tables. You can find the code examples of that chapter online at https://latexguide.org/chapter-06.

While the recipes are based on standard LaTeX tabular environments, you can use them similarly with tabular*, tabularx, tabulary, and related environments...