LaTeX Beginner's Guide: Create visually appealing texts, articles, and books for business and science using LaTeX

A newer, fully updated LaTeX Beginner's Guide, Third Edition, is available. It covers modern LaTeX features: advanced PDF capabilities, automation for large documents, and AI-powered tools for troubleshooting and productivity

Key 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 online

Book Description

LaTeX 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 formulas

Who this book is for

If 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.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with LaTeX
2. Formatting Text and Creating Macros
3. Designing Pages
4. Creating Lists
5. Including Images
6. Creating Tables
7. Using Cross-References
8. Listing Content and References
9. Writing Math Formulas
10. Using Fonts
11. Developing Large Documents
12. Enhancing Your Documents Further
13. Troubleshooting
14. Using Online Resources

Stefan Kottwitz studied mathematics in Jena and Hamburg. He works as a network and IT security engineer both for Lufthansa Industry Solutions and for Eurowings Aviation. For many years, he has been providing LaTeX support on online forums. He maintains the web forums LaTeX and goLaTeX and the Q&A sites TeXwelt and TeXnique. He runs the TeX graphics gallery sites TeXample, TikZ, and PGFplots, the TeXlive online compiler, the TeXdoc service, and the CTAN software mirror. He is a moderator of the TeX Stack Exchange site and matheplanet. He publishes ideas and news from the TeX world on his blogs LaTeX and TeX. Before this book, he authored the first edition of LaTeX Beginner's Guide in 2011, and LaTeX Cookbook in 2015, both published by Packt.