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)

Exploring the wealth of math symbols

Let's go beyond writing variables and basic math operators. We may need many symbols for particular purposes: relation signs, unary and binary operators, function-like operators, sum and integral symbols and variants of the latter, arrows, and many more. LaTeX and additional packages offer thousands of symbols for many purposes.

So, let's look at some math symbols and the commands for producing them. We shall cover many standard LaTeX symbols; the latexsym package provides some additional symbols. Even more symbols are accessible using, for instance, the amssymb package.

Binary operation symbols

Besides plus and minus, there are a few more operations:

Figure 9.19 – Binary operation symbols

You need to have \usepackage{latexsym} in your document preamble to be able to use the symbols in the last row here.

Binary relation symbols

Values of expressions might be equal, in which case you just need...