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)

Including images with optimal quality

First, it’s crucial to ensure that your images are of good quality initially.

Bitmap images, such as JPG/JPEG and PNG files, possess a fixed number of pixels, so they may become blurry or pixelated when scaled.

Vector images, in contrast, maintain quality even when scaled. You can zoom in and out, and they keep looking fine. An example of this is the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format. LaTeX does not natively support it. However, SVG images can be converted to Portable Document Format (PDF) and PostScript (PS), which are also vector formats, though they can contain bitmap images.

SVG images can also be converted to TiKZ images. We will speak about TikZ in Chapter 6, Creating Graphics. In any case, opting for vector formats over bitmap formats is advisable.

Today, the pdfLaTeX compiler is the most widely used. It allows the direct inclusion of PDF images. Furthermore, it supports the mentioned bitmap formats, JPG/JPEG and PNG...