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LaTeX Cookbook

You're reading from   LaTeX Cookbook Over 90 hands-on recipes for quickly preparing LaTeX documents to solve various challenging tasks

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2015
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781784395148
Length 378 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Tools
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Author (1):
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Stefan Kottwitz Stefan Kottwitz
Author Profile Icon Stefan Kottwitz
Stefan Kottwitz
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Toc

Table of Contents (14) Chapters Close

Preface 1. The Variety of Document Types FREE CHAPTER 2. Tuning the Text 3. Adjusting Fonts 4. Working with Images 5. Beautiful Designs 6. Designing Tables 7. Contents, Indexes, and Bibliographies 8. Getting the Most out of the PDF 9. Creating Graphics 10. Advanced Mathematics 11. Science and Technology 12. Getting Support on the Internet Index

Quick-start for beginners


LaTeX provides a special syntax for math expressions. Furthermore, it has to be declared what is math but not text to get properly printed. Let's see how to write math!

How to do it...

We will practice math basics now. Let's write a document:

  1. As usual, start with a document class.

    \documentclass{article}
  2. Start the document:

    \begin{document}
  3. Let's have an unnumbered section for our text:

    \section*{The golden ratio}
  4. Write a statement containing math. Enclose each math formula within parentheses. As usual for LaTeX commands, write a backslash before each parenthesis.

    The symbol for the golden ratio is the Greek
    letter \( \varphi \). Its value is the positive
    solution of \( x^2 - x - 1 = 0 \).
  5. Continue the text; this time, math shall be set off and centered:

    It can be calculated to:
    \[
      \varphi = \frac{1 + \sqrt{5}}{2} = 1.618 \ldots
    \]
  6. End the document:

    \end{document}
  7. Compile the document, and take a look:

How it works...

Math is differently written compared to normal text. For example...

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