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)

Generating a timeline

Creating a line and adding ticks, date values, and annotations is straightforward using essential TikZ functions.

Using the timeline library, we’ll explore an alternative and colorful pre-designed approach in this recipe.

Getting ready

Until the timeline library becomes an official part of TikZ or becomes available on CTAN, you can download the tikzlibrarytimeline.code.tex file from the author’s repository at https://github.com/cfiandra/timeline. You can install it in the TeX tree like any other package, but the easiest way is to put it into the same folder as your main TeX document.

How to do it...

The timeline library builds on TikZ but provides its own high-level commands. Follow these steps:

  1. Start with a document class with a paper size that is big enough:
    \documentclass[a3paper]{article}
  2. Load the geometry package with the landscape option, since our diagram will be more wide than high:
    \usepackage[landscape]{geometry...