LaTeX Cookbook: Over 90 hands-on recipes for quickly preparing LaTeX documents to solve various challenging tasks

To be able to work with LaTeX, you need install the following on your computer:

If you already have these installed, great! In that case, you can skip the next paragraphs and immediately proceed to the first recipe.

A PDF reader is probably already installed on your computer, such as the Foxit Reader, the Adobe Reader or the Preview app on the Mac. Furthermore, most editors come with an integrated PDF previewer. So, let's take a look at the TeX software and editors.

We will start with a complete small document, already using various features. This can be your template, into which you can add your own text later on.

While we go through the document step by step, you may open the complete code directly with your editor, so you don't need to type it. It is contained in the code bundle available at the book's page https://www.packtpub.com and at the book's page http://latex-cookbook.net. Perform the following steps to create a small document:

In the first line, we loaded the document class scrartcl. In square brackets, we set options for specifying an A4 paper size with one-sided printing and a font size of 12 pt. Finally, we chose to have a full line between paragraphs in the output so that we can easily distinguish paragraphs.

Without further ado, we began the text with a table of contents. While numbered sections are started by the \section command, we can start unnumbered sections by using the starred version \section*. However, we used the KOMA-Script command \addsec for the first unnumbered section. That's because, in contrast with \section*, the \addsec command generates an entry in the table of contents.

An empty line tells LaTeX to make a paragraph break.

As bulleted lists are a good way to clearly present points, we used an itemize environment for this. All environments start with the \begin command and are ended with the \end command.

An equation environment has been used to display a formula that is automatically numbered. We used the \label command to set an invisible anchor mark so we could refer to it using its label name by the \ref command and get the equation number in the output.

Small formulas within text lines have been enclosed in \( ... \), which provides inline math mode. Dollar symbols, $ ... $, can be used instead of \( ... \), which makes typing easier. However, the use of parentheses makes it easier to understand where the math mode starts and where it ends, which may be beneficial when many math expressions are scattered throughout the text.

For further information on math typesetting, refer to Chapter 10, Advanced Mathematics, specifically to the recipe Finetuning a formula.

The part of the document before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble. It contains global settings. By adding a few lines to our document preamble, we can improve our document and modify the general appearance. Chapter 2, Tuning the Text, starts with additions that are beneficial for small documents as well. They enable the direct input of accented characters and unicode symbols, and they improve justification and hyphenation.

In Chapter 3, Adjusting Fonts, you can find recipes for changing the fonts of either the whole document or of certain elements.

For further customization tasks, such as modifying page layout, and adding a title page, refer to the recipe Designing a book in the current chapter. We will take a look at such settings on the occasion of a book example.

Though the ClassicThesis package may already be installed in your TeX system, named classicthesis.sty, the whole template is an archive of files that should go into your working directory.

Download the ClassicThesis archive from CTAN by visiting http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/classicthesis/.

Instead of fetching single files, choose to download it as a .zip file. Unzip it to where you keep your personal documents, in its own directory. This directory will be your thesis directory.

This package provides a ready-made structured filesystem of the main document, style file, settings file, and document parts such as the abstract and foreword, and also chapters in dedicated files. You can edit all files and fill in your own text.

The ClassicThesis.tex file is the main document. Its filler text is the template's manual; this allows us to compile the template immediately for looking at the output design. By compiling, you can also verify that your TeX installation can handle additional packages if you need to install any.

After unzipping, your directory will have the following structure:

Now follow these steps:

Don't worry if the font or margins don't please you yet. You can change the layout at any time. Let's take a closer look now, and then you will know how.

We will take a look at the functional lines of the main file, MyThesis.tex.

The document preamble is as follows:

\documentclass[ twoside,openright,titlepage,
                numbers=noenddot,headinclude,
                footinclude=true,cleardoublepage=empty,
                BCOR=5mm,paper=a4,fontsize=11pt,
                ngerman,american,%
                ]{scrreprt}
\input{classicthesis-config}

The template is built on the KOMA-Script class, scrreprt. KOMA-Script as a LaTeX bundle is described in this chapter's first recipe, Writing a short text.

You can change the preset options to those you need, such as the font size or binding correction BCOR. There are many class options for adjusting the layout; you can read about them in the KOMA-Script manual. Type texdoc scrguien in Command prompt, or visit http://texdoc.net/pkg/scrguien. We will discuss some of them in depth in our next recipe, Designing a book.

Loading of packages and all the remaining settings is done in a single file, classicthesis-config.tex. We will look at it later in this recipe.

The document body starts with the following commands:

\begin{document}
\frenchspacing
\raggedbottom
\selectlanguage{american}
\pagenumbering{roman}
\pagestyle{plain}

The \frenchspacing line means that there's a single space following the punctuation after a sentence. Before the twentieth century, people stuffed extra space between sentences. LaTeX does this by default, or you can enter the \nonfrenchspacing line. The language is set to American English. Actually, you would need the \selectlanguage line only if you need to switch between languages for correct hyphenation.

We start with Roman page numbers. The plain page style means that we have no page headers for now, while page numbers are centered in the page footer.

Then, we look at the front matter, which is the part of the document where the formal parts before the actual content go:

\include{FrontBackmatter/DirtyTitlepage}
\include{FrontBackmatter/Titlepage}
\include{FrontBackmatter/Titleback}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Dedication}
%\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Foreword}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Abstract}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Publication}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Acknowledgments}
\pagestyle{scrheadings}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Contents}

Each commonly-required part of the front matter has its own file. Just edit the file as you need it, comment out by inserting a % symbol at the beginning of a line, or remove what you don't need. The \cleardoublepage line ends a page, but also ensures that the next page starts on the right-hand side. This can mean inserting an empty page if necessary; that is, a double page break. This will not happen if you change the twoside option to oneside, so you can keep the \cleardoublepage line, which will act like a \clearpage command when the oneside option is set.

Finally, we got the main matter:

\pagenumbering{arabic}
%\setcounter{page}{90}
% use \cleardoublepage here to avoid problems with pdfbookmark
\cleardoublepage
\part{Some Kind of Manual}
\include{Chapters/Chapter01}
\cleardoublepage
\ctparttext{You can put some informational part preamble text here...}
\part{The Showcase}
\include{Chapters/Chapter02}
\include{Chapters/Chapter03}

In the main matter, we use Arabic page numbers. The \pagenumbering line resets the page number to 0.

The thesis is divided into parts. Each one is split into chapters. You can omit the \part lines if you want your highest sectioning level to be the chapter level.

In the Chapters subdirectory, each chapter has its own .tex file; so, you can easily handle a large amount of text. Furthermore, you can use the \includeonly command to compile just the selected chapters for speeding up writing.

Finally, the main document ends with the back matter:

\appendix
\cleardoublepage
\part{Appendix}
\include{Chapters/Chapter0A}
%********************************************************************
% Other Stuff in the Back
%*******************************************************
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Bibliography}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Colophon}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Declaration}
\end{document}

The command \appendix resets the sectioning counters and changes them to alphabetic numbering, that is, the following chapters will be numbered A, B, and so on. Like in the front matter, the parts of the appendix are divided into several files.

Let's take a look at the configuration file. Open the classicthesis-config.tex file. The whole thing would take too much space in the book, so let's just take a look at some sample lines:

\newcommand{\myTitle}{A Classic Thesis Style\xspace}
\newcommand{\myName}{Andr\'e Miede\xspace}
\newcommand{\myUni}{Put data here\xspace}
\newcommand{\myLocation}{Darmstadt\xspace}
\newcommand{\myTime}{August 2012\xspace}

Here, you can fill in your own data. Besides being printed on the title page, this data will be used as metadata for the generated PDF document. There are more supported macros here, such as \mySubtitle, \myProf, and many more. The \xspace takes care of proper spacing after such a macro; that is, it inserts a space when there's no punctuation mark following it.

As mentioned, this template contains design decisions inspired by the book The Elements of Typographical Style by Robert Bringhurst. The most notable design decisions are as follows:

Explore the classicthesis-config.tex file further to make modifications. Like in the previous recipe, we apply document-wide changes within the preamble, and here, we do it in this file.

We will now take a look at the selected lines of that configuration file.

\PassOptionsToPackage{latin9}{inputenc}
\usepackage{inputenc}

\PassOptionsToPackage{eulerchapternumbers,listings,drafting,%
  pdfspacing,%floatperchapter,%linedheaders,%
  subfig,beramono,eulermath,parts}{classicthesis}

\usepackage[inner=1.5cm,outer=3cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm,
  bindingoffset=5mm]{geometry}

\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{format=hang,font=small}

\PassOptionsToPackage{fleqn}{amsmath} 
\usepackage{amsmath}

In the following chapters, you can find a lot of recipes for content elements in your thesis. For a beautiful thesis, elegant tables are of great value, so you may also want to take a look at the Advanced table design recipe in Chapter 5, Beautiful Designs.