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 tab stops to write in columns

Remember the time of the typewriter and early word processing software? When we needed to line up some text in columns, we could use tab stops. LaTeX provides a similar way to easily align text in columns, namely, the tabbing environment.

We want to present a quick overview of LaTeX. We shall present one point on each line, aligned at words and colons, with the help of the following steps:

  1. Begin a new document and open a tabbing environment:
    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    \begin{tabbing}
  2. Write the text, set tab stops with \=, and end the line with \\:
      \emph{Info:} \= Software \= : \= \LaTeX \\
  3. Add further lines, move to the next tab stop with \>, and again, end lines with \\:
      \> Author \> : \> Leslie Lamport \\
      \> Website \> : \> www.latex-project.org
  4. Close the tabbing environment and end the document:
    \end{tabbing}
    \end{document}
  5. Click the Typeset button to...