LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Stefan Kottwitz

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801072588
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Harness the power of LaTeX and its wide range of features to create professional-looking text, articles, and books with both online and offline capabilities of LaTeXKey Features• Get a hands-on introduction to LaTeX using fully explained examples to advance from beginner to LaTeX professional quickly• Write impressive mathematical, scientific, and business papers or theses using LaTeX• Explore LaTeX onlineBook DescriptionLaTeX 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.What you will learn• Make the most of LaTeX's powerful features to produce professionally designed texts• Download, install, and set up LaTeX and use additional styles, templates, and tools• Typeset math formulas and scientific expressions to the highest standards• Understand how to include graphics and work with figures and tables• Discover professional fonts and modern PDF features• Work with book elements such as bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes• Typeset documents containing tables, figures, and formulasWho this book is forIf you are about to write mathematical or scientific papers, seminar handouts, or even plan to write a thesis, this book offers you a fast-paced and practical introduction to LaTeX. School and university students will find this easy-to-follow LaTeX guide helpful, as will mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and humanists. Anybody with high expectations from their software will discover how easy it is to leverage LaTeX's high performance for creating documents.

Chapter 1: Getting Started with LaTeX

You are familiar with word processing software: you type something, and the software prints it as it is on screen. In contrast, LaTeX, as typesetting software, receives instructions and text from you, and then creates the output. It produces high-quality output based on sophisticated algorithms for justification, text alignment, whitespace balancing, figure placement, and more, such as predefined formatting styles for headings and general page layout, which you can customize.

Are you ready to leave those "what you see is what you get" word processors behind and to enter the world of accurate, reliable, and high-quality typesetting? Yes? Then let's go together!

It's great that you decided to learn LaTeX. This book will guide you along the way to help you get the most out of it. Let's speak briefly about LaTeX's benefits and the challenges, and then we shall prepare our tools.

In this chapter, we will get to know LaTeX, as well as how to install and use it. Specifically, our topics will be as follows:

• What is LaTeX?
• Installing and using LaTeX
• Working with LaTeX online using Overleaf
• Accessing documentation

At the end of this chapter, you will have working LaTeX software, and you will know how to edit and typeset a document and how to obtain further documentation.

So, let's get started.

Technical requirements

We will focus on the Windows operating system here, but you can also install LaTeX on Mac OS X, Linux, and other systems.

A complete installation takes about 8 GB of disk space.

If you have an internet connection, you don't have to install LaTeX. You can use online LaTeX software, such as Overleaf. We will look at Overleaf at the end of this chapter.

All code examples of this book are available on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/LaTeX-Beginner-s-Guide.

On the book's website, https://latexguide.org, you can read, edit, and compile every code example in this book online without installing anything. An internet browser with JavaScript enabled is all you need for this, and a PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX is free, open source software for typesetting documents. In other words, it's a document preparation system. LaTeX is not a word processor, but it's a document markup language.

It was initially written by Leslie Lamport and is based on the TeX typesetting engine by Donald Knuth. People often refer to it as just TeX, meaning LaTeX. It has a long history; you can read about it at https://tug.org/whatis.html.

For now, let's continue by looking at how we can make the most of LaTeX.

Benefits of LaTeX

LaTeX is especially well suited for scientific and technical documents. LaTeX's superior typesetting of mathematical formulas is legendary. Suppose you are a student or a scientist. In that case, LaTeX is by far the best choice, and even if you don't need its scientific capabilities, there are other uses—it produces very high-quality output and is incredibly stable. It handles complex documents easily, no matter how large they are.

Some more remarkable strengths of LaTeX are its cross-referencing capabilities, the ability for automatic numbering, and the generation of lists of contents, figures and tables, indexes, glossaries, and bibliographies. It is multilingual with language-specific features, and it can use PostScript and PDF features.

Apart from being perfect for scientists, LaTeX is incredibly flexible—there are templates for letters, presentations, bills, philosophy books, law texts, music scores, and even chess game notation. Hundreds of LaTeX users have written thousands of templates, styles, and valuable tools for every possible purpose. It is collected and categorized online on archiving servers.

You could benefit from its impressive high quality by starting with its default styles and relying on its intelligent formatting, but you are free to customize and modify everything. People of the TeX community have already written a lot of extensions addressing nearly every formatting need.

Virtues of open source

The code of LaTeX is entirely open source, free, and readable for everyone. This enables you to study and change everything, from the core of LaTeX to the latest extension packages. But what does this mean for you as a beginner? There's a huge LaTeX community with a lot of friendly, helpful people. Even if you cannot benefit from the open source code directly, they can read the source and assist you. Just join a LaTeX web forum and ask your questions there. Helpers will, if necessary, dig into LaTeX sources and, in all probability, find a solution for you, sometimes by recommending a suitable package, often providing a redefinition of a default command.

Today, we're already profiting from about 30 years of development by the LaTeX community. The open source philosophy made it possible, as every user is invited to study and improve the software and develop it further. Chapter 14, Using Online Resources, will point the way to the community.

Separation of form and content

A fundamental principle of LaTeX is that the author should not be distracted too much by formatting issues. Usually, the author focuses on the content and formats logically. For example, instead of writing a chapter title in big, bold letters, you just tell LaTeX that it's a chapter heading. You can let LaTeX design the heading or decide in the document's settings what the headings will look like—just once for the whole document. LaTeX extensively uses style files called classes and packages, making it easy to design and modify the entire document's appearance and all of its details.

Portability

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Table of contents

• LaTeX Beginner's Guide
• Second Edition
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Getting Started with LaTeX
• Chapter 2: Formatting Text and Creating Macros
• Chapter 3: Designing Pages
• Chapter 4: Creating Lists
• Chapter 5: Including Images
• Chapter 6: Creating Tables
• Chapter 7: Using Cross-References
• Chapter 8: Listing Contents and References
• Chapter 9: Writing Math Formulas
• Chapter 10: Using Fonts
• Chapter 11: Developing Large Documents
• Chapter 12: Enhancing Your Documents Further
• Chapter 13: Troubleshooting
• Chapter 14: Using Online Resources
• Other Books You May Enjoy