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

Time for action – redefining the footnote line


We will use \renewcommand to override the default \footnoterule command:

  1. Take the previous example and add the following lines to the preamble:

    \renewcommand{\footnoterule}
        {\noindent\smash{\rule[3pt]{\textwidth}{0.4pt}}}
  2. Typeset and see how the line has changed:

What just happened?

Remember the definition of \newcommand—here it's analogous. The existing command \footnoterule will be replaced by a new definition that we wrote in the second line. The command \rule[raising]{width}{height} draws a line, here 0.4 pt thick, and as wide as the text, raised a bit by 3 pt. Through the command \smash, we let our line pretend to have a height and a depth of zero, so it's occupying no vertical space at all. This way, the page balancing will not be affected. You already know \noindent, which avoids the paragraph indentation.

If you want to omit that line completely, you just need to write:

\renewcommand{\footnoterule}{}

Now the command is defined to do nothing...