Occasionally, you may get warnings such as “overfull \hbox" or notice words hanging into the margin. This indicates that LaTeX had severe problems with justification. Now, we will look at how to improve such a situation by ensuring proper hyphenation and integrating microtypographic support.

How to do it...

We can start with any document. We will optimize it by applying particular settings in the preamble. If you don’t have a document readily available, you can take one from the code package for this book, specifically for the first chapter, or download one from https://latex-cookbook.net. Take the following steps:

1. Load the babel package with your document languages as options. Use the preferred language as the last option:

   \usepackage[ngerman,english]{babel}

2. If you would like to use handy shortcuts of ngerman with English too, add the following lines:

   \useshorthands{"}
   \addto\extrasenglish{\languageshorthands...

You can add notes to the margin to make a text more dynamic, annotate critical passages, and explain or comment on a piece of the body text. This can enhance understanding and aid in studying.

How to do it...

For our first document with margin notes, we will use the very first document from Chapter 1, Exploring Various Document Classes. Edit that document as follows:

1. Load the marginnote package in the document preamble:

   \usepackage{marginnote}

2. To highlight margin notes using color, load the xcolor package :

   \usepackage{xcolor}

3. Choose a font shape, color, or size for the margin notes, such as the following:

   \renewcommand*{\marginfont}{\strut\color{blue}%
     \sffamily\scriptsize}

4. Within the document text, add margin notes in the lines where you want them to be positioned. For example, like this:

   \addsec{Introduction}
   This document will be our starting point for simple
   documents.\marginnote{No chapters supported!}
   It is suitable for a...

Numbers are sometimes written as text instead of using numerals. LaTeX is capable of automatically converting numbers to words. This feature is especially useful for values originating from LaTeX counters, such as page or section numbers.

How to do it...

We will load the fmtcount package and use its commands for conversion.

1. Start with any document class, such as the article class:

   \documentclass{article}

2. Load the fmtcount package:

   \usepackage{fmtcount}

3. Begin the document:

   \begin{document}

4. Write some text. Proceed the following way:
   • Whenever you like to convert a number to a word, use the command \numberstringnum.
   • For printing a counter value as a word, use \numberstring.
   • For a similar purpose, but in ordinal form, use \ordinalstringnum or \ordinalstring.

   Enter the following lines to practice the new commands:

   This document should have \numberstringnum{32}
   pages. Now, we are on page \numberstring{page}
   in the \ordinalstring{section} section...

You often see important content put into a colored box, a common practice on posters and slides, although it’s also used in other documents. In this recipe, we will put a little text and whole paragraphs into a colored box, including making a title for the box.

How to do it...

We will use the tcolorbox package. It is based on the pgf bundle, so you need to have also that package installed.

We will create a box with the defaults, a titled box with split content, and boxes placed inline that fit the width of the content. Proceed as follows:

1. Create a small document based on any document class. The article class is a simple choice. Load the blindtext package to generate dummy text. This time, we will use the pangram option to create short pangrams as dummy text. The blindtext package requires the babel package, so we will load it before. We also set English as the language. Furthermore, load the tcolorbox package. So, our base document...

When designing a document, obtaining precise information about the dimensions and positioning of layout elements, such as the text body, header, footer, and the space allocated for the margin notes, is often helpful. LaTeX can print helplines for you to examine and finetune the layout.

How to do it...

We will use the showframe package. Take the following steps:

1. Open your document or any sample for testing. Here, we will use the very first document from Chapter 1, Exploring Various Document Classes.
2. Add the following line at the end of your preamble:

   \usepackage{showframe}

3. Compile the document. You can see frames around the text body, the margin note area, the header, and the footer as you can see here:

Figure 2.6 – A page layout overview

Examining the layout can inspire adjustments, such as modifying the margins or other page dimensions. When you no longer need these helplines, you can deactivate the...

LaTeX utilizes boxes to organize and position text and symbols, whether entire paragraphs or individual letters and symbols. In this recipe, we will closely examine the dimensions of these boxes, the spacing between them, and the resulting dimensions of dynamically adjusted space. This will give us a deeper understanding of typesetting.

In this section, we will use LuaLaTeX. LuaLaTeX is a variant of LaTeX based on the LuaTeX compiler that integrates the Lua scripting language within TeX. It’s a modern alternative to the pdfLaTeX compiler we usually utilize in this book if not mentioned otherwise. In Chapter 11, Using LaTeX in Science and Technology, we will explore Lua programming.

How to do it...

We will additionally load the lua-visual-debug package. Then, we will compile with LuaLaTeX as follows:

1. Open your document or any sample file. Again, we will use the document from our first recipe in Chapter 1, Exploring Various...

In addition to full horizontal justification, LaTeX adjusts the page content vertically to maintain a consistent page height. Consequently, the internal spacing within a page can vary. As a result, lines on adjacent pages may look shifted.

For two-sided prints with very thin paper, matching baselines would look much better. Especially in two-column documents, it may be desirable to have baselines of adjacent lines at precisely the same height.

In this recipe, our goal is to arrange lines on a grid. Regular text lines shall be placed at a baseline grid. Displayed formulas, figures, tables, and captions are allowed to have a different baseline, but the subsequent text should return to the grid.

How to do it...

We’ll use the grid package specifically developed for grid typesetting. Follow these steps:

1. Begin by creating a small two-column example with placeholder text to which we can apply the grid commands. Here is a straightforward code...

LaTeX takes care of full justification, balancing text height, and positioning floating objects such as figures and tables. It does a great job, but sometimes, we may need to tell LaTeX to put text or an image precisely at a specific position on a page.

Most positioning commands work in relation to the current position in the document. Now, we would like to output text at an absolute position.

How to do it...

We will use the eso-pic package for precise positioning. We will print text at the edge of the page, in the middle, and at specific positions. We will break down the code into small steps. However, you can copy the entire code from GitHub or the book’s website at https://latex-cookbook.net.

Follow these steps:

1. Start with any document class. We chose the article class with A5 paper size.

   \documentclass[a5paper]{article}

2. Load the lipsum package so that you can generate placeholder text:

   \usepackage{lipsum}

3. Load the graphicx...

In older texts, such as in fairy tale books, we sometimes see the first paragraph in a text starting with a huge letter while the following text flows around it. This design element is referred to as a drop cap or an initial. We will now use this design for our own text.

How to do it...

We will use the lettrine package, which offers a dedicated command for this purpose. Follow these steps:

1. Start a document with any document class. In this example, we’ve opted for the book class. We will use A6 paper size because the recipe is easier to show with little text.

   \documentclass{book}
   \usepackage[a6paper]{geometry}

2. Load the lettrine package:

   \usepackage{lettrine}

3. Begin the document:

   \begin{document}

4. Start a paragraph with the command \lettrine{letter}{further introduction}, as follows:

   \lettrine{O}{nce upon a time}, professional writers
   used a mechanical machine called a typewriter. It
   commonly printed fixed-width characters. Emphasizing
   was...

There are situations when text doesn’t have a strict rectangular shape. For example, if you want to print on a DVD or compact disc label, the whole text should fit within a circular boundary.

How to do it...

The shapepar package can typeset paragraphs in a particular shape, such as a circle, a hexagon, or a heart. The shape size will be automatically adjusted to accommodate the provided text. We will now try it with a heart:

1. Start a small document, load the blindtext package for dummy text and the shapepar package:

   \documentclass{article}
   \usepackage{blindtext}
   \usepackage{shapepar}

2. In the document body, use the \shapepar command with a shape type argument, and then your text, as follows:

   \begin{document}
   \shapepar{\heartshape}\blindtext[2]
   \end{document}

3. Compile and have a look:

Figure 2.15 – Text in the shape of a heart

How it works...

We loaded the blindtext package, which provides filler...

To capture readers’ interest in a text, we can present a brief and appealing excerpt as a quotation. We can pull out some text. In a two-column layout, it looks nice to put the quotation into a window at the center of the page between the two columns, with the regular text flowing around it. It’s also an excellent way of embedding images.

How to do it...

One approach is to use the shapepar package to cut out space from the text, like in the previous recipe. However, doing it twice, once for each column, would take some work.

The pullquote package provides a solution. It can typeset a balanced two-column text layout with a cut-out window. This can be filled with text or an image. The shape is arbitrary.

We will use placeholder text and highlight a quote by Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX.

1. Download the file pullquote.dtx from https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tex-sx/tex-sx/development/view/head:/pullquote.dtx.
2. Click on “...