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 – letting a figure float


Both the figure and the table environment take an optional argument affecting the final placement of the figure or the table. We shall test the effect in our graphics example:

  1. Go back to the previous example. This time, add the options h and t:

    \begin{figure}[ht]
    \centering
    \includegraphics{test}
    \caption{Test figure}
    \end{figure}
  2. Typeset, notice the change in the output.

  3. Change the options into !b:

    \begin{figure}[!b]
    
  4. Typeset, the figure is now forced to float to the bottom. Compare both results:

What just happened?

Just by adding some characters standing for placement options, we could force the figure to appear where we wanted it to.

Understanding float placement options

The optional argument of the figure and table environment tells LaTeX where it's allowed to place the figure or the table. Four letters stand for four possible places:

  • h stands for here. The float may appear where it's been written in the source code.

  • t stands for top. Placing at the top...