Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefan Kottwitz
4 (1)
Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

4 (1)
By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

LaTeX is high-quality open source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. It's a powerful and complex tool with a multitude of features, so getting started can be intimidating. However, once you become comfortable with LaTeX, its capabilities far outweigh any initial challenges, and this book will help you with just that! The LaTeX Beginner's Guide will make getting started with LaTeX easy. If you are writing mathematical, scientific, or business papers, or have a thesis to write, this is the perfect book for you. With the help of fully explained examples, this book offers a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples that will help you achieve professional-level results in no time. You'll learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements such as bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes, and go on to manage complex documents and use modern PDF features. You'll also get to grips with using macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. By the end of this LaTeX book, you'll have learned how to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional-looking tables, include figures, present complex mathematical formulas, manage complex documents, and benefit from modern PDF features.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Installing and using LaTeX

Let's start with the installation of the LaTeX distribution, TeX Live. This distribution is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X (MacTeX), and other Unix-like operating systems. TeX Live is well maintained, and it is actively developed.

Alternative LaTeX distribution

Another excellent and user-friendly LaTeX distribution for Windows is MiKTeX. It's easy to install, like any other Windows application. You can download it from https://miktex.org. Visit https://latexguide.org/distributions for a detailed, up-to-date comparison.

You can install TeX Live for a single user (that's you) or as a shared installation for all users on a computer. The latter is called admin mode. It requires running the installation as an administrator: either log in with an administrator account or right-click on the install program and choose Run as administrator.

It is recommended to install in single-user mode.

First, we will visit the TeX Live homepage...