Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By : Stefan Kottwitz
Book Image

LaTeX Cookbook

By: Stefan Kottwitz

Overview of this book

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting software and is very popular, especially among scientists. Its programming language gives you full control over every aspect of your documents, no matter how complex they are. LaTeX's huge amount of customizable templates and supporting packages cover most aspects of writing with embedded typographic expertise. With this book you will learn to leverage the capabilities of the latest document classes and explore the functionalities of the newest packages. The book starts with examples of common document types. It provides you with samples for tuning text design, using fonts, embedding images, and creating legible tables. Common document parts such as the bibliography, glossary, and index are covered, with LaTeX's modern approach.You will learn how to create excellent graphics directly within LaTeX, including diagrams and plots quickly and easily. Finally, you will discover how to use the new engines XeTeX and LuaTeX for advanced programming and calculating with LaTeX. The example-driven approach of this book is sure to increase your productivity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
LaTeX Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Visualizing the layout


At the time of designing a document, one may like to have an exact view of the dimensions and position of the text body, the header and footer, and the space for the margin notes. LaTeX can print help lines for you so you can examine the layout and use it to position extra elements.

How to do it...

Load the showframe package. This means the following steps:

  1. Open your document or a sample for testing. Here, we will use the very first document from Chapter 1, The Variety of Document Types.

  2. Add the following line at the end of your preamble:

    \usepackage{showframe}
  3. Compile the document. You will see frames around text body, margin note area, and header and footer:

  4. Examining the layout can give you ideas about making adjustments, such as changing the margins or other page dimensions. If you don't need these help lines any more, you can disable the package by commenting out \usepackage{showframe} or by deleting it.

How it works...

We simply loaded the showframe package. It prints...