LaTeX Beginner's Guide

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.

Chapter 2, Formatting Words, Lines, and Paragraphs, explains how to vary font, shape, and style of text. It deals with the centering and justification of paragraphs and how you can improve line breaks and hyphenation. It introduces the concept of logical formatting and teaches you 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 layout. 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. Furthermore, you will get familiar with accessing package documentation.

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

Chapter 5, Creating Tables and Inserting Pictures, shows you how to create professional-looking tables and how to include external pictures in your documents. It deals with typesetting captions to tables and figures. We will learn how to benefit from LaTeX's automated tables and figures placement and how to fine-tune it.

Chapter 6, Cross-Referencing, introduces means of intelligent referencing to sections, footnotes, tables, figures, and numbered environments in general. Chapter 7, Listing Content and References, deals with creating and customizing of a table of contents and lists of figures and tables. Furthermore, it teaches how to cite books, how to create bibliographies, and how to generate an index.

Chapter 8, Typing 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 how to build complex math structures such as fractions, stacked expressions, and matrices.

Chapter 9, Using Fonts, takes us into the world of fonts and demonstrates various fonts for Roman, sans-serif, and typewriter fonts in different shapes. By the way, you will learn about character encoding and font encoding.

Chapter 10, Developing Large Documents, helps in managing large documents by splitting them into several files. It shows how to swap out settings, how to reuse code, and how to compile just parts of a bigger document. After reading this chapter, you will be able to create complex projects building upon sub-files. Furthermore, we deal with the front matter and back matter with different page numbering and separate title pages. We will work it out by creating an example book. By doing this, you will get familiar with using templates, finally being able to write our own thesis, book, or report.

Chapter 11, Enhancing Your Documents Further, brings color into your documents. It shows you how to modify the headings of chapters and all kinds of sections. We will learn how to create feature-rich PDF documents with bookmarks, hyperlinks, and meta-data. While doing this, we visit the TeX Catalogue Online to look out for further useful LaTeX packages and we will go through a package installation.

Chapter 12, 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 you will know how to use them for fixing errors.

Chapter 13, Using Online Resources, guides you through the vast amount of LaTeX information on the Internet. We will visit a LaTeX online forum and a LaTeX question-and-answer site. This chapter points the way to huge LaTeX software archives, to homepages of TeX user groups, to mailing lists, Usenet groups, and LaTeX blogs. It tells you where you can download LaTeX-capable editors and where you can find enhanced versions of TeX, such as XeTeX, LuaTeX, and ConTeXt. Finally, you will know how to access the knowledge of the worldwide LaTeX community and how to become a part of it.