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)

Building smart diagrams

At first, let’s focus on a quick win – getting a diagram with minimal technical effort. So we would just need to fill in our thoughts.

The smartdiagram package makes building diagrams of various types very easy.

How to do it...

Once you have loaded the smartdiagram package, you only need a simple command. Follow these steps:

  1. As always, begin with any document class:
    \documentclass{article}
  2. Load the smartdiagram package:
    \usepackage{smartdiagram}
  3. Start the document:
    \begin{document}
  4. Define the diagram. An option in square brackets defines the type, and an argument in curly braces contains a comma-separated list of items:
    \smartdiagram[flow diagram:horizontal]{Edit,
      \LaTeX, Bib\TeX/ biber, make\-index, \LaTeX}
  5. End the document:
    \end{document}
  6. Compile, and take a look at the output:
Figure 6.1 – A horizontal flow chart

Figure 6.1 – A horizontal flow chart

How it works...

We generated the image with...