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 an animation

To show a developing process or visualize changes, an in-place animation can be more convenient than a series of images.

As an example application, we will draw a recursively defined fractal curve, the Koch curve. An animation shall present the stages of the curve, which becomes more complex with more recursions.

How to do it...

The animate package provides a simple way to generate an animation. Let’s try this with the Koch curve to show growing complexity by performing the following steps:

  1. Start with any document class. Here, we’ve chosen the standalone class, which we already mentioned earlier. So, the animation tightly fits on the page:
    \documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}
  2. Load the animate package:
    \usepackage{animate}
  3. Load the TikZ package. Furthermore, load the lindenmayersystems library to produce fractals and the shadings library for filling with a shading:
    \usepackage{tikz}
    \usetikzlibrary{lindenmayersystems,shadings...