First Edition
LATEX is a beautiful programming language. One sometimes wants to write in an easy and quick way various documents, such as letters, papers, reports, theses, and so on. Here, “one” can be a new student, an old professor, or even somebody who is not linked at all with any academic stuff.
We often want special constructs in our documents. This is more difficult than basic typesetting, especially using LATEX when you are not experienced.
On one hand, scientists do not always have the time to learn another programming language, especially if they are making a PhD, or doing something else which asks for a lot of time. Using direct and working programming tricks can speed up your productivity, and make you learning better. But where can they be found?
On the other hand, everybody wants to make nice documents, if possible.
A nicer document attracts the reader. Evidently, “a nice document” is a subjective notion. By “nice document,” we want to speak about a document which
1. is structured in an unambiguous way, and has a clear presentation, 2. is read with pleasure, if possible.
The beginner, whoever he is, often faces strange errors because he tries to teach LATEX to do what he wants it to do. It is difficult to learn the advanced notions about LATEX, even in an average period of time. The good books have to be found. But that is often the moment where you lack of time and that you are happy to find complete solutions. That is a moment where you tell to yourself “Is there no folk out there to give me such a trivial tip?” but nobody hears it. The aim of this book, is to avoid you these problems: you do not need to write everything from scratch, ask on various forums or Usenet groups, or even read heaps of books just to make a simple script. That is my goal. You can now continue writing your document in LATEX’s philosophy: concentrating on your document’s content, at the place of its appearence.XX Preface
These reasons justify the presence of this book. I have tried to pack the most useful tricks which can enhance your documents’ content in a concise way. The aim is not to teach LATEX programming, but to give a quick reference to all the tips and tricks that can be used if you are encountering a (difficult) problem, or simply facing a question which you cannot find the answer to.
I consider that the reader is familiar with basic LATEX programming. It can be learnt from various sources: [22, 28, 47, 55, 59, 97, 165, 175], and many others.
In many book(let)s, a part is always devoted to tell how the reader should read the book. It is, at least to me, often too directive. Here is the way I propose you to read this booklet. Firstly, have a look at the table of contents.
Many different subjects are treated in this booklet, and reading them from one to another, until the end, could be really boring. You may, after having read the table of contents, roughly check the two parts, and then begin to read what you need to read. If you simply want to learn something about a particular subject, you will find this booklet very useful. On the other hand, if you want to read everything, you can, but the structure of the document has not been thought for such a reading scheme. Depending on your degree of knowledge with LATEX, you can 1. either read everything, because you do not know a lot about this, 2. or read particular subjects, referring to the outline, to deepen your knowledge.
I hope this will give you new ideas about advanced ways to typeset text and to make different processes automatic, thus giving you more time for other activities.
If you have any suggestion, whatever the topic, feel free to send me an e-mail at
[email protected]
Li`ege, Luca Merciadri
October, 2009
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