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)

Creating front and back matter

In contrast to reports, books often begin with introductory material such as copyright information, a foreword, acknowledgments, or a dedication. This part, including the title page and the table of contents, is called the front matter.

At the end, a book might include an afterword and supporting material such as a bibliography and an index. This part is called the back matter.

The book class and some other classes, such as scrbook and memoir, support this kind of sectioning directly. Often, desired consequences of this sectioning are differences in the numbering of pages and chapters. Let's see how it works.

Our book will begin with a dedication. The front matter will consist of the table of contents, lists of tables and figures, and a dedication. All the pages of the front matter will be numbered with Roman numerals. Finally, we add an appendix providing supplementary proofs, which we like to present outside the main chapters:

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