Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By : Stefan Kottwitz
Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting software and is very popular, especially among scientists. Its programming language gives you full control over every aspect of your documents, no matter how complex they are. LaTeX's huge amount of customizable templates and supporting packages cover most aspects of writing with embedded typographic expertise. With this book you will learn to leverage the capabilities of the latest document classes and explore the functionalities of the newest packages. The book starts with examples of common document types. It provides you with samples for tuning text design, using fonts, embedding images, and creating legible tables. Common document parts such as the bibliography, glossary, and index are covered, with LaTeX's modern approach.You will learn how to create excellent graphics directly within LaTeX, including diagrams and plots quickly and easily. Finally, you will discover how to use the new engines XeTeX and LuaTeX for advanced programming and calculating with LaTeX. The example-driven approach of this book is sure to increase your productivity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
LaTeX Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Writing chemical formulae


Chemical formulae and equations have a different style compared to mathematical formulae and equations. For example:

  • Letters mean atomic symbols and are written upright, unlike italic math variables

  • Numbers are commonly used in subscripts, indicating the number of atoms

  • We use a lot of subscripts and superscripts, and they should be aligned properly

  • We need also left subscripts and superscripts

  • We need special symbols such as for bonds and arrows for chemical equations

With basic LaTeX, it's hard to achieve all of this. Let's find a better way.

How to do it...

We will use the chemformula package. We will boldly go ahead and type some chemical stuff to see how it works. The LaTeX output will follow, so you may look ahead line by line if you like. Let's start:

  1. Begin with a document class of your choice, such as scrartcl of KOMA-Script:

    \documentclass{scrartcl}
  2. Load the chemformula package:

    \usepackage{chemformula}
  3. Start the document:

    \begin{document}
  4. We begin with an unnumbered...