Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Book Image

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

LaTeX is high-quality Open Source typesetting software that produces professional prints and PDF files. However, as LaTeX is a powerful and complex tool, getting started can be intimidating. There is no official support and certain aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. It may seem more straightforward to use Word or other WYSIWG programs, but once you've become acquainted, LaTeX's capabilities far outweigh any initial difficulties. This book guides you through these challenges and makes beginning with LaTeX easy. If you are writing Mathematical, Scientific, or Business papers, or have a thesis to write, then this is the perfect book for you. LaTeX Beginner's Guide offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX with plenty of step-by-step examples. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements like bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes and go on to managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand. This practical book will guide you through the essential steps of LaTeX, from installing LaTeX, formatting, and justification to page design. Right from the beginning, you will learn to use macros and styles to maintain a consistent document structure while saving typing work. You will learn to fine-tune text and page layout, create professional looking tables as well as include figures and write complex mathematical formulas. You will see how to generate bibliographies and indexes with ease. Finally you will learn how to manage complex documents and how to benefit from modern PDF features. Detailed information about online resources like software archives, web forums, and online compilers completes this introductory guide. It's easy to use LaTeX, when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide to hand.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
LaTeX
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs
Index

Summary


This chapter started with easy and comfortable hyper-linking and ended with an outlook to a very powerful graphic package, namely, TikZ.

By reading this chapter, we are now capable of:

  • Enhancing our document with a hypertext structure

  • Designing visually different styles for different types of links

  • Providing a navigation bar for the reader by adding bookmarks

  • Editing the PDF metadata

  • Designing font and layout of headings

  • Adding color to our texts

Now that we've got most of the tools we need for successful writing, what's ahead is specialized advanced classes and packages. However, this won't be difficult for you. Since you have mastered the fundamental LaTeX challenges, you're now able to use any other package together with reading its documentation. The vast majority of classes and packages are very well documented. And there are no secrets—everything is open source.

During our work, we may encounter errors and warnings. That's common, also for advanced LaTeX users. The following chapter...