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)

Aligning numerical data

Standard alignment options in table columns are left, right, and centered. However, we may need more precise alignment options when dealing with numerical values. The most effective way to compare number magnitudes is by aligning digits at specific positions, such as decimal points. Integers can simply be right aligned. Numbers with decimal fractions could be filled up with zeroes to get decimal points aligned, but that would add vacuous noise. Adding zeroes also could lead to a wrong impression of accuracy.

In the case of fractions, it’s good to align at the decimal points directly. In this recipe, we will implement this.

How to do it...

The siunitx package is primarily intended for typesetting values with units consistently. It provides a tabular column type for aligning at decimal points as an additional benefit. We will use this now as follows:

  1. Load the siunitx package in your preamble:
    \usepackage{siunitx}
  2. Use S as the column...