LaTeX: Beginner’s Guide

04/14/2011 · No Responses

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.

Create professional-looking texts, articles, and books for Business and Science

What you will learn from this book :

Install LaTeX and use the TeXworks editor to compile documents
Design the page layout; create dynamic headers and footers
Fine-tune appearances and the space of words, symbols, and lines
Apply intelligent justification and customized hyphenation to achieve fine text design
Typeset professional-looking tables and create bulleted and enumerated lists
Write sophisticated math formulas, from in-text expressions to complex multi-line equations with various alignments
Cross-reference objects such as figures, tables, and equations
Load fonts and vary their shape and style; choose between thousands of LaTeX symbols from specialized fonts
Use macros to save time and effort; load packages to extend LaTeX’s capabilities
Generate an index, cite books, and create bibliographies
Use external pictures, color, PDF bookmarks, and hyperlinks
Structure and manage large documents by splitting the input
Manage large documents containing lists, index, and bibliography

Approach
Packed with fully explained examples, LaTeX Beginner’s Guide is a hands-on introduction quickly leading a novice user to professional-quality results.

Who this book is written 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. Particularly during studying in school and university you will benefit much, as a mathematician or physicist as well as an engineer or a humanist. Everybody with high expectations who plans to write a paper or a book will be delighted by this stable software.