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)

Importing data from an external file

It can be convenient to fetch the data for the row entries from an external file. This is particularly useful for large datasets, especially when the data originates from an external data source or application, such as an Excel spreadsheet. Such applications often provide an export feature, particularly exporting to a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file. Such files have plain text format with a simple tabular structure, with each line representing a table row and commas separating the cells.

Only a few lines are needed to import such a CSV file into a LaTeX table.

How to do it...

We will load the datatool package, let it import data from a comma-separated file, sort it, and print it. Follow these steps:

  1. Store your data in the same folder as your main tex document. Here, we will use the data from the previous recipe, stored in a file named linux.csv:
    Distribution,Hits
    MX Linux,2717
    Mint,2097
    EndeavourOS,2055
    Manjaro,1382
    Debian,1316...