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)

Handling warnings

Warning messages are for your information. They don't always point to a severe problem, but often it's a good idea to read these tips carefully and act accordingly. This may improve your document.

We will test this now. Let's say we want to emphasize text that is in a sans-serif font. We expect italic sans-serif text as a result.

Let's try this:

  1. Take our "Hello world!" example and modify it this way:
    \documentclass{article}
    \renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
    \begin{document}
    \emph{Hello world!}
    \end{document}
  2. Compile. LaTeX will print out a warning in the log file:
    LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape `OT1/cmss/m/it' in size <10> not available
    (Font) Font shape `OT1/cmss/m/sl' tried instead on input line 4.
  3. Check the output:

Figure 13.4 – Slanted shape instead of italic shape

The \familydefault macro stands for the default font family used in the LaTeX document...