Preface

LaTeX is a 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, and specific aspects such as layout modifications can seem rather complicated. Using Microsoft Word or other word-processing software may seem more straightforward, 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 technical papers, this is the perfect book for you.

LaTeX Beginner's Guide Second Edition offers you a practical introduction to LaTeX. Beginning with the installation and basic usage, you will learn to typeset documents containing tables, figures, formulas, and common book elements such as bibliographies, glossaries, and indexes. Lots of step-by-step examples start with fine-tuning text, formulas, and page layout, and proceed with managing complex documents and using modern PDF features. It's easy to start with LaTeX when you have LaTeX Beginner's Guide Second Edition at 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. This book will help you learn to create professional-looking tables, along with including figures and writing 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 such as software archives, web forums, and online compilers complement this introductory guide.

Who this book is for

If you are about to write mathematical or scientific papers, seminar handouts, or even plan to write a thesis, then this book offers you a fast-paced and practical introduction. Those studying in school and university as mathematicians or physicists will benefit greatly, as well as engineers and humanities students. Anybody with high expectations who plans to write a paper or a book will be delighted by this high-quality, stable software.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with LaTeX, introduces LaTeX and explains its benefits. It guides you through the download and installation of a comprehensive LaTeX distribution and shows you how to create your first LaTeX document. It also introduces the use of the online LaTeX software Overleaf. Furthermore, you will get familiar with accessing package documentation.

Chapter 2, Formatting Text and Creating Macros, explains how to vary font, shape, and text styles. It deals with centering and justification of paragraphs and how we can improve line breaks and hyphenation. It introduces logical formatting and describes how to define macros and how to use environments and packages.

Chapter 3, Designing Pages, shows how you can adjust the margins and change the line spacing. It demonstrates portrait, landscape, and two-column layouts. In this chapter, we will create dynamic headers and footers and learn how to control page breaking and how to use footnotes. Along the way, you will also learn about redefining existing commands and using class options.

Chapter 4, Creating Lists, deals with arranging text in bulleted, numbered, and definition lists. You will learn how to choose bullets and numbering styles and how to design the overall layout of lists.

Chapter 5, Including Images, shows you how to include external pictures with captions in your documents. You will learn how to benefit from LaTeX's automated figures placement and how to fine-tune it.

Chapter 6, Creating Tables, shows you how to create professional-looking tables and goes deep into formatting details.

Chapter 7, Using Cross-References, introduces intelligent referencing to sections, footnotes, tables, figures, and numbered environments in general.

Chapter 8, Listing Contents and References, deals with creating and customizing a table of contents and lists of figures and tables. Furthermore, it explains how to cite books, create bibliographies, and generate an index.

Chapter 9, Writing Math Formulas, explains mathematical typesetting in depth. It starts with basic formulas and continues with centered and numbered equations. It shows how to align multi-line equations. In detail, it shows how to typeset math symbols such as roots, arrows, Greek letters, and operators. Moreover, you will learn to build complex math structures such as fractions, stacked expressions, and matrices.

Chapter 10, Using Fonts, takes us into the world of fonts and demonstrates various fonts, including Roman, sans-serif, and typewriter fonts, in different shapes.

Chapter 11, Developing Large Documents, helps in managing large documents by splitting them into several files. After reading this chapter, you will be able to create complex projects building upon sub-files. Furthermore, we deal with front matter and back matter with different page numbering and separate title pages. We will work through this by creating an example book. By doing this, you will get familiar with using document templates, and finally you can write your own thesis, book, or report.

Chapter 12, Enhancing Your Documents Further, brings color into your documents. It shows you how to modify headings of chapters and all kinds of sections. We will learn how to create feature-rich PDF documents with bookmarks, hyperlinks, and metadata.

Chapter 13, Troubleshooting, provides us with tools for problem-solving. We will learn about different kinds of LaTeX errors and warnings and how to deal with them. After reading this chapter, you will understand LaTeX's messages and know how to use them to fix errors.

Chapter 14, Using Online Resources, guides you through the vast amount of LaTeX information on the internet. We will visit an online LaTeX forum and a LaTeX Q&A site. This chapter points the way to the huge LaTeX software archives, TeX user groups' homepages, mailing lists, Usenet groups, and LaTeX graphics galleries. It tells you where you can download LaTeX-capable editors and where you can meet LaTeX friends on blogs and Twitter.

To get the most out of this book

You need access to a computer with LaTeX on it. An online connection would be helpful regarding installation and updates. We can install LaTeX on most operating systems, so you can use Windows, Linux, macOS, or Unix.

This book uses the freely available TeX Live distribution, which runs on all mentioned platforms. You just need an internet connection or the TeX Live DVD to install it. In the book, we work with the cross-platform editor TeXworks, but you could use any editor you like.

Without installing LaTeX, you can work with the code examples at https://latexguide.org, which comes with an online compiler.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book's GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/LaTeX-Beginner-s-Guide-Second-Edition. If there's an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

The book's website at https://latexguide.org offers code downloads as well. You may also visit https://latex-cookbook.net, which provides further complete code examples with an online compiler.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Load the fontenc package and choose T1 font encoding."

A block of code is set as follows:

\[
  \int_a^b \! f(x) \, dx = \lim_{\Delta x \rightarrow 0}
  \sum_{i=1}^{n} f(x_i) \,\Delta x_i
\]

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{cleveref}
\crefname{enumi}{position}{positions}
\begin{document}
\chapter{Statistics}
\label{stats}
\section{Most used packages by LaTeX.org users}
\label{packages}

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Click the Typeset button to compile the document."

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [e-mail] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

LaTeX questions: If you have any question about LaTeX, you can visit the author's forum at https://latex.org

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