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)

Accessing documentation

There are many hundreds of LaTeX classes and packages available. No book could ever explain all its features on its own. But most of those packages offer good documentation that you can easily open and read. If you work your way through this book and supplement it with the documentation of the packages mentioned, you're on the right track to becoming a LaTeX power user.

In the following chapters, you will learn about many LaTeX packages that provide additional capabilities. To be prepared, you should just know how to access package documentation.

You can open a package manual directly on your computer after you have installed LaTeX:

  • On Windows computer: In the Start menu, choose the TeX Live folder, and click TeX Live command-line. Alternatively, just run the Windows cmd app.
  • On a Mac or any Linux computer: Start a Terminal app.

Then, just type texdoc packagename and press Enter. For example, typing texdoc geometry opens a PDF document...