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 beautiful ornaments

Especially in older books, we find typographic ornaments such as calligraphic flowers. In this recipe, we will create a greeting card with such ornaments.

Getting ready

We will use the pgfornament package written by Alain Matthes and based on designs by Vincent Le Moign and Chennan Zhang. At the time of writing, it contains 196 high-quality vintage ornaments. It’s included with TeX Live and MiKTeX; ensure you have it installed.

How to do it...

We will use a KOMA-Script class because of its arbitrary base font size. The calligra package made by Gerd Neugebauer provides a font with a hand-written style:

  1. Load the document class, set paper and text dimensions, and choose a page style without the printed page number:
    \documentclass[paper=a6,landscape,
                   fontsize=30pt]{scrartcl}
    \areaset{0.9\paperwidth}{0.68\paperheight}
    \pagestyle{empty}
  2. Activate...