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)

Working with templates

When we develop a document, we specify the document class, choose meaningful packages and options, and create a frame for the content. To repeat these steps for each document would be too laborious.

If we plan to write several documents of the same type, we may create a template. This could be a .tex file containing the following:

  • A declaration of a suitable document class together with a set of meaningful options
  • Routinely used packages and packages that are most eligible for our document type
  • A predefined layout for the header, footer, and body of the text
  • Self-made macros to facilitate our work
  • A framework of sectioning commands, where we fill in the headings and the body text
  • Or a framework containing \include or \input commands, for which we create the body text chunks later on

As we improve our LaTeX knowledge, such templates might grow and become better and more sophisticated. Many users publish their elaborate templates...