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

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

LaTeX Beginner's Guide

Second Edition

Copyright © 2021 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Group Product Manager: Rohit Rajkumar

Publishing Product Manager: Ashitosh Gupta

Senior Editor: Hayden Edwards

Content Development Editor: Rashi Dubey

Technical Editor: Simran Haresh Udasi

Copy Editor: Safis Editing

Project Coordinator: Manthan Patel

Proofreader: Safis Editing

Indexer: Manju Arasan

Production Designer: Roshan Kawale

First published: March 2011

Second edition: August 2021

Production reference: 1030921

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-80107-865-8

www.packt.com

To the members of TUG and DANTE for supporting TeX and LaTeX development, infrastructure, and education. To all the helpers on internet forums for their tireless support for LaTeX beginners.

– Stefan Kottwitz

Contributors

About the author

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.org and goLaTeX.de and the Q&A sites TeXwelt.de and TeXnique.fr. He runs the TeX graphics gallery sites TeXample.net, TikZ.net, and PGFplots.net, the TeXlive.net online compiler, the TeXdoc.org service, and the CTAN.net software mirror. He is a moderator of the TeX Stack Exchange site and matheplanet.com. He publishes ideas and news from the TeX world on his blogs LaTeX.net and TeX.co.

Before this book, he authored the first edition of LaTeX Beginner's Guide in 2011, and LaTeX Cookbook in 2015, both published by Packt.

About the reviewers

LianTze Lim has reveled in the joys and beauty of LaTeX typesetting for nearly two decades. She is currently Community TeXpert at Overleaf and has been helping Overleaf users with LaTeX-related questions since 2014.

Joseph Wright is the author of the popular siunitx package for units, leads maintenance of the beamer class, and is a member of the LaTeX project. He is also one of the moderators on the popular TeX – LaTeX Stack Exchange Q&A site.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Getting Started with LaTeX

Technical requirements

What is LaTeX?

Benefits of LaTeX

Virtues of open source

Separation of form and content

Portability

Protection for your work

How to get started with LaTeX

Approaches to working with LaTeX

Installing and using LaTeX

Installing TeX Live using the net installer wizard

Installing TeX Live offline

Installing TeX Live on other operating systems

Updating TeX Live and installing new packages

Creating our first document

Checking out advanced LaTeX editors

Working with LaTeX online using Overleaf

What Overleaf requires and delivers

Benefits of Overleaf

Caveats of working online

Creating our first document online

Exploring Overleaf

Grammar and language feedback with Writefull

Reviewing and commenting

Accessing documentation

Summary

Chapter 2: Formatting Text and Creating Macros

Technical requirements

Working with logical formatting

Creating a document with a title and heading

Exploring the document structure

Understanding LaTeX commands

Understanding LaTeX environments

Understanding how LaTeX reads our input

Printing out special symbols

Modifying the text fonts

Adjusting the font shape

Choosing the font family

Confining the effect of commands by braces

Exploring font sizes

Creating our own commands

Using macros for simple text

Proper spacing after commands

Creating more universal commands and using arguments

Using boxes to limit the width of paragraphs

Creating a narrow text box

Producing common paragraph boxes

Exploring further features of paragraph boxes

Using mini pages

Breaking lines and paragraphs

Improving hyphenation

Preventing hyphenation

Improving the justification

Breaking lines manually

Exploring line breaking options

Preventing line breaks

Turning off full justification

Creating ragged-right text

Creating ragged-left text

Centering text

Using environments for justification

Displaying quotes

Quoting longer text

Summary

Chapter 3: Designing Pages

Technical requirements

Creating a book with chapters

Defining the margins

Using class options

Designing headers and footers

Understanding page styles

Customizing headers and footers

Using decorative lines in headers or footers

Changing LaTeX's header marks

Using footnotes

Modifying the footnote line

Using packages to expand footnote styles

Breaking pages

Enlarging a page

Changing the line spacing

Creating a table of contents

Summary

Chapter 4: Creating Lists

Technical requirements

Building lists

Creating a bulleted list

Building an enumerated list

Producing a definition list

Customizing lists

Getting compact lists

Choosing bullets and numbering format

Suspending and continuing lists

Summary

Chapter 5: Including Images

Technical requirements

Including an image

Choosing an optimal file type

Scaling an image

Including whole pages

Putting images behind the text

Managing floating images

Understanding placement options

Forcing the output of figures

Limiting floating

Avoiding floating at all

Arranging several images

Letting text flow around images

Summary

Chapter 6: Creating Tables

Technical requirements

Using tab stops to write in columns

Typesetting tables

Drawing lines in tables

Understanding formatting arguments

Increasing the row height

Beautifying tables

Adjusting lengths

Spanning entries over multiple columns

Inserting code column-wise

Spanning entries over multiple rows

Adding captions to tables

Placing captions above

Customizing captions

Using packages for further customizations

Auto-fitting columns to the table width

Generating multi-page tables

Coloring tables

Using landscape orientation

Aligning columns at the decimal point

Handling narrow columns

Summary

Chapter 7: Using Cross-References

Technical requirements

Setting labels and references

Assigning a label

Referring to a label

Referring to a page

Using advanced referencing

Producing intelligent page references

Fine-tuning page references

Referring to page ranges

Using automatic reference names

Combining intelligent references with automatic naming

Referring to labels in other documents

Turning references into hyperlinks

Summary

Chapter 8: Listing Contents and References

Technical requirements

Customizing the table of contents

Adjusting the depth of the TOC

Shortening entries

Adding entries manually

Creating and customizing lists of figures

Creating a list of tables

Using packages for customization

Generating an index

Defining index entries and subentries

Specifying page ranges

Using symbols and macros in the index

Referring to other index entries

Fine-tuning page numbers

Designing the index layout

Creating a bibliography

Using the standard bibliography environment

Using bibliography databases with BibTeX

Looking at the BibTeX entry fields

Referring to Internet resources

Understanding BibTeX entry types

Choosing the bibliography style

Listing references without citing

Changing the headings

Summary

Chapter 9: Writing Math Formulas

Technical requirements

Writing basic formulas

Embedding math expressions within text

Displaying formulas

Numbering equations

Adding subscripts and superscripts

Using operators

Taking roots

Writing fractions

Writing Greek letters

Writing script letters

Producing an ellipsis

Changing the font, style, and size

Customizing displayed formulas

Typesetting multi-line formulas

Numbering rows in multi-line formulas

Inserting text into formulas

Exploring the wealth of math symbols

Binary operation symbols

Binary relation symbols

Inequality relation symbols

Subset and superset symbols

Arrows

Harpoons

Symbols derived from letters

Miscellaneous symbols

Writing units

Variable sized operators

Variable sized delimiters

Building math structures

Creating arrays

Typesetting matrices

Writing binomial coefficients

Underlining and overlining

Setting accents

Putting a symbol above or below another one

Writing theorems and definitions

Further tools for writing mathematics

Summary

Chapter 10: Using Fonts

Technical requirements

Using comprehensive font bundles

Latin Modern – a replacement for the standard font

Kp-Fonts – another extensive set of fonts

Using specific font families

Serif fonts

Sans-serif fonts

Typewriter fonts

Calligraphic fonts

Using arbitrary fonts

Selecting the main font

Selecting multiple font families

Summary

Chapter 11: Developing Large Documents

Technical requirements

Splitting the input

Including small pieces of code

Including bigger parts of a document

Compiling parts of a document

Creating front and back matter

Designing a title page

Working with templates

Summary

Chapter 12: Enhancing Your Documents Further

Technical requirements

Using hyperlinks and bookmarks

Adding hyperlinks

Customizing hyperlinks

Creating hyperlinks manually

Creating bookmarks manually

Using math formulas and special symbols in bookmarks

Designing headings

Coloring our documents

Summary

Chapter 13: Troubleshooting

Technical requirements

Understanding and fixing errors

Handling the preamble and document body

Using commands and environments

Writing math formulas

Working with files

Creating tables and arrays

Working with lists

Working with floating figures and tables

General syntax errors

Handling warnings

Justifying text

Referencing

Choosing fonts

Placing figures and tables

Customizing the document class

Avoiding obsolete classes and packages

General troubleshooting

Summary

Chapter 14: Using Online Resources

Web forums, Q&A sites, and discussion boards

LaTeX.org

TeX and LaTeX on Stack Exchange

Forums in other languages

Usenet groups

Lists of frequently asked questions

Mailing lists

TeX user group sites

The TeX Users Group

DANTE

The LaTeX project

UK TUG – TeX in the United Kingdom

Other local user groups

Websites for LaTeX software and editors

LaTeX distributions

LaTeX editors

CTAN – the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

Graphics galleries

LaTeX blogs

Twitter messages

Summary

Why subscribe?

Other Books You May Enjoy

Packt is searching for authors like you

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

Appear like this.

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 [email protected] 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

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

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