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)

Chapter 2: Formatting Text and Creating Macros

In the last chapter, we installed LaTeX and used the TeXworks editor, as well as Overleaf, to write our first document. Now, we will look at the structure of text and focus on the text details and its formatting.

In this chapter, we will talk about the following:

  • Working with logical formatting
  • Understanding how LaTeX reads our input
  • Modifying the text fonts
  • Creating our own commands
  • Using boxes to limit the width of paragraphs
  • Breaking lines and paragraphs
  • Turning off full justification
  • Displaying quotes

By working with examples and trying out new features, we shall learn some basic concepts of LaTeX. By the end of this chapter, you will be familiar with commands and environments. You will even be able to define your own commands.

Now that you've started working intensively, you may encounter error messages when there's a problem with the document code. In such a case, you can look to Chapter 13, Troubleshooting, for possible solutions.