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)

Changing the headings

As in our diagram example in Figure 8.2, if you don't like the heading Contents, you could easily change it. LaTeX stores the text of the heading in the \contentsname text macro. So, just redefine it as follows:

\renewcommand{\contentsname}{Table of Contents}

Here's a list of such macros and their default values:

  • \contentsname: Contents
  • \listfigurename: List of figures
  • \listtablename: List of tables
  • \bibname: Bibliography (in the book and report classes)
  • \refname: References (in the article class)
  • \indexname: Index

Furthermore, as promised, here's a list of other macros for names used by LaTeX, with their default values:

  • \figurename: Figure
  • \tablename: Table
  • \partname: Part
  • \chaptername: Chapter
  • \abstractname: Abstract
  • \appendixname: Appendix

This is not really surprising! Using name macros is especially useful when you write in another language. For instance, the babel...