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 Graphics

In this chapter, we will explore LaTeX’s extensive graphic capabilities. You will learn to create impressive graphics of various kinds.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Building smart diagrams
  • Constructing a flowchart
  • Growing a tree
  • Building a bar chart
  • Drawing a pie chart
  • Drawing a Venn diagram
  • Putting thoughts into a mind map
  • Generating a timeline

A picture is worth a thousand words. Presenting a single image can significantly simplify the understanding of complex concepts. Diagrams, in particular, help to distill pertinent information, showcase relationships and process sequences, and facilitate quantity comparisons.

In this chapter, you will primarily find recipes for various diagram types, complemented by further valuable graphic recipes.

All the recipes in this chapter are based on the highly capable graphics package pgf/TikZ. pgf stands for Portable Graphics Format, serving as the backend,...