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)

Removing white margins

To reuse the PDF output of your LaTeX document in another document, in an e-book, or on a website, it’s usually a good idea to remove the margins or at least make them smaller.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you need to have installed:

  • The PS interpreter software Ghostscript
  • The programming language Perl
  • The pdfcrop script

Fortunately, TeX Live automatically installs internal versions of Ghostscript and Perl, offering pdfcrop as a package. So, TeX Live users are lucky. You may need to install the software if you don’t use TeX Live. You can find more information at https://www.ghostscript.com, https://www.perl.org, and https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfcrop.

How to do it...

The actual procedure is easy, given that the command line won’t be an obstacle for you, as you use LaTeX. Follow these steps:

  1. Go to the command line:
    • On Linux or Unix, open a shell
    • On Ubuntu Linux and macOS, the shell you need to open is called...