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)

Using arbitrary fonts

Arbitrary is a bit broadly worded, but the meaning is valid as today, we can choose among many thousands of fonts that were not even prepared for LaTeX. That may be operating system fonts, TrueType fonts, or modern OpenType fonts.

Let's use some fonts that are available on a Microsoft Windows 10 computer.

Selecting the main font

We can either open Settings / Fonts via the Windows start menu or look into the folder C:\Windows\Fonts to see the installed fonts. The Segoe UI font appears available with several names, so let's choose Segoe UI Semilight. We will see whether it's hard to use:

  1. Start a new document:
    \documentclass{article}
  2. Load the fontspec package because it provides us with font selection commands:
    \usepackage{fontspec}
  3. Choose the main font:
    \setmainfont{Segoe UI Semilight}
  4. Write the document body with some large text:
    \begin{document}
    \large
    The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890
    \end{document...