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)

Customizing lists

The default appearance of lists is meaningful regarding the spacing, indentation, and symbols. Nevertheless, it may be required to use another scheme for the enumeration, for the bullets, or to modify the line spacing or their indentation. Some packages help us to save space, as well as to customize the symbols. Let's start with the spacing.

Getting compact lists

A frequently arising question is how to reduce the space in lists. LaTeX's lists are often regarded as being too spacious. We shall see how to implement that.

Let's shrink our list in this tutorial. We shall remove the whitespace around the list items and before and after the whole list as well. Follow these steps:

  1. In our enumerated list example that produced Figure 4.3, add the paralist package and replace enumerate with compactenum and itemize with compactitem:
    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{paralist}
    \begin{document}
    \begin{compactenum}
      \item State the paper...