Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you. LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand. This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
LaTeX
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
Index

About the Author

Stefan Kottwitz studied mathematics in Jena and Hamburg. Afterwards, he worked as an IT Administrator and Communication Officer onboard cruise ships for AIDA Cruises and for Hapag-Lloyd Cruises. Following 10 years of sailing around the world, he is now employed as a Network & IT Security Engineer for AIDA Cruises, focusing on network infrastructure and security such as managing firewall systems for headquarters and fleet.

In between contracts, he worked as a freelance programmer and typography designer. For many years he has been providing LaTeX support in online forums. He became a moderator of the web forum http://latex-community.org/ and of the site http://golatex.de/. Recently, he began supporting the newly established Q&A site http://tex.stackexchange.com/ as a moderator.

He publishes ideas and news from the TeX world on his blog at http://texblog.net.