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 class options

We already know that a document class is the basis of our document. It provides commands and environments extending the LaTeX standard features. Though the class provides a default style, it's customizable with document class options.

We shall change the orientation of our first example to landscape. We would also like to typeset our text in two columns:

  1. Add the options landscape and twocolumn to the \documentclass statement of our example, as follows:
    \documentclass[a4paper,12pt,landscape,twocolumn]{book}
  2. Load the geometry package:
    \usepackage{geometry}
  3. Click on Typeset to compile, and see how the layout has changed:

Figure 3.2 – A landscape two-column page layout

By using the landscape option, we switched the page orientation from portrait to landscape. By using the twocolumn option, we caused the body text to be divided into two columns.

We loaded the geometry package to get the proper PDF page size...