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)

Producing fillable forms

PDF files can be interactive. Users can fill out forms before printing the entire document. With LaTeX, you can produce such forms. In this recipe, we will create a form.

How to do it...

Once again, we will use the hyperref package. We aim to produce small paper sheets for a survey as a fillable PDF form. A yellow background shall distinguish it from other papers. The format will be landscape. Let’s begin the process:

  1. Start a new document with A6 paper in landscape format and a small inter-paragraph space instead of paragraph indentation, as follows:
    \documentclass[a6paper,landscape,
      parskip=half]{scrartcl}
  2. Set a small margin to save space on the screen:
    \usepackage[margin=0.4cm]{geometry}
  3. Set the background color as 30% yellow:
    \usepackage{xcolor}
    \pagecolor{yellow!30}
  4. Choose an empty page style, so we won’t get page numbers:
    \pagestyle{empty}
  5. Load the hyperref package:
    \usepackage{hyperref}
  6. Start the...