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

Adding shape, shading, and transparency


While tables in books and theses are expected to be sober, presentations at talks are often more colorful. In this recipe, we will take a look at how to add graphical elements, such as rounded borders and shaded colors, to tables.

How to do it...

We will use the beamer class, which is very popular for doing presentations. We will take an ordinary tabular environment, put it into a TikZ node, and add shape and color using TikZ.

It's a challenging example, but it shows what we can achieve. Follow these steps:

  1. Choose the beamer class, remove the navigation symbols argument, and add a background template with some shading:

    \documentclass{beamer}
    \setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
    \setbeamertemplate{background canvas}[vertical shading]%
      [top = blue!1, bottom = blue!40]
  2. Load the booktabs package for nicer lines:

    \usepackage{booktabs}
  3. Load TikZ and its calc library, and add a background layer:

    \usepackage{tikz}
    \usetikzlibrary{calc}
    \pgfdeclarelayer{background...