We will start with a complete small document, already using various features. This can be your template, into which you can add your own text later on.

While we go through the document step by step, you may open the complete code directly with your editor, so you don't need to type it. It is contained in the code bundle available at the book's page https://www.packtpub.com and at the book's page http://latex-cookbook.net. Perform the following steps to create a small document:

In the first line, we loaded the document class scrartcl. In square brackets, we set options for specifying an A4 paper size with one-sided printing and a font size of 12 pt. Finally, we chose to have a full line between paragraphs in the output so that we can easily distinguish paragraphs.

Without further ado, we began the text with a table of contents. While numbered sections are started by the \section command, we can start unnumbered sections by using the starred version \section*. However, we used the KOMA-Script command \addsec for the first unnumbered section. That's because, in contrast with \section*, the \addsec command generates an entry in the table of contents.

An empty line tells LaTeX to make a paragraph break.

As bulleted lists are a good way to clearly present points, we used an itemize environment for this. All environments start with the \begin command and are ended with the \end command.

An equation environment has been used to display a formula that is automatically numbered. We used the \label command to set an invisible anchor mark so we could refer to it using its label name by the \ref command and get the equation number in the output.

Small formulas within text lines have been enclosed in \( ... \), which provides inline math mode. Dollar symbols, $ ... $, can be used instead of \( ... \), which makes typing easier. However, the use of parentheses makes it easier to understand where the math mode starts and where it ends, which may be beneficial when many math expressions are scattered throughout the text.

For further information on math typesetting, refer to Chapter 10, Advanced Mathematics, specifically to the recipe Finetuning a formula.

The part of the document before the \begin{document} command is called the preamble. It contains global settings. By adding a few lines to our document preamble, we can improve our document and modify the general appearance. Chapter 2, Tuning the Text, starts with additions that are beneficial for small documents as well. They enable the direct input of accented characters and unicode symbols, and they improve justification and hyphenation.

In Chapter 3, Adjusting Fonts, you can find recipes for changing the fonts of either the whole document or of certain elements.

For further customization tasks, such as modifying page layout, and adding a title page, refer to the recipe Designing a book in the current chapter. We will take a look at such settings on the occasion of a book example.

Though the ClassicThesis package may already be installed in your TeX system, named classicthesis.sty, the whole template is an archive of files that should go into your working directory.

Download the ClassicThesis archive from CTAN by visiting http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/classicthesis/.

Instead of fetching single files, choose to download it as a .zip file. Unzip it to where you keep your personal documents, in its own directory. This directory will be your thesis directory.

This package provides a ready-made structured filesystem of the main document, style file, settings file, and document parts such as the abstract and foreword, and also chapters in dedicated files. You can edit all files and fill in your own text.

The ClassicThesis.tex file is the main document. Its filler text is the template's manual; this allows us to compile the template immediately for looking at the output design. By compiling, you can also verify that your TeX installation can handle additional packages if you need to install any.

After unzipping, your directory will have the following structure:

Now follow these steps:

Don't worry if the font or margins don't please you yet. You can change the layout at any time. Let's take a closer look now, and then you will know how.

We will take a look at the functional lines of the main file, MyThesis.tex.

The document preamble is as follows:

\documentclass[ twoside,openright,titlepage,
                numbers=noenddot,headinclude,
                footinclude=true,cleardoublepage=empty,
                BCOR=5mm,paper=a4,fontsize=11pt,
                ngerman,american,%
                ]{scrreprt}
\input{classicthesis-config}

The template is built on the KOMA-Script class, scrreprt. KOMA-Script as a LaTeX bundle is described in this chapter's first recipe, Writing a short text.

You can change the preset options to those you need, such as the font size or binding correction BCOR. There are many class options for adjusting the layout; you can read about them in the KOMA-Script manual. Type texdoc scrguien in Command prompt, or visit http://texdoc.net/pkg/scrguien. We will discuss some of them in depth in our next recipe, Designing a book.

Loading of packages and all the remaining settings is done in a single file, classicthesis-config.tex. We will look at it later in this recipe.

The document body starts with the following commands:

\begin{document}
\frenchspacing
\raggedbottom
\selectlanguage{american}
\pagenumbering{roman}
\pagestyle{plain}

The \frenchspacing line means that there's a single space following the punctuation after a sentence. Before the twentieth century, people stuffed extra space between sentences. LaTeX does this by default, or you can enter the \nonfrenchspacing line. The language is set to American English. Actually, you would need the \selectlanguage line only if you need to switch between languages for correct hyphenation.

We start with Roman page numbers. The plain page style means that we have no page headers for now, while page numbers are centered in the page footer.

Then, we look at the front matter, which is the part of the document where the formal parts before the actual content go:

\include{FrontBackmatter/DirtyTitlepage}
\include{FrontBackmatter/Titlepage}
\include{FrontBackmatter/Titleback}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Dedication}
%\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Foreword}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Abstract}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Publication}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Acknowledgments}
\pagestyle{scrheadings}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Contents}

Each commonly-required part of the front matter has its own file. Just edit the file as you need it, comment out by inserting a % symbol at the beginning of a line, or remove what you don't need. The \cleardoublepage line ends a page, but also ensures that the next page starts on the right-hand side. This can mean inserting an empty page if necessary; that is, a double page break. This will not happen if you change the twoside option to oneside, so you can keep the \cleardoublepage line, which will act like a \clearpage command when the oneside option is set.

Finally, we got the main matter:

\pagenumbering{arabic}
%\setcounter{page}{90}
% use \cleardoublepage here to avoid problems with pdfbookmark
\cleardoublepage
\part{Some Kind of Manual}
\include{Chapters/Chapter01}
\cleardoublepage
\ctparttext{You can put some informational part preamble text here...}
\part{The Showcase}
\include{Chapters/Chapter02}
\include{Chapters/Chapter03}

In the main matter, we use Arabic page numbers. The \pagenumbering line resets the page number to 0.

The thesis is divided into parts. Each one is split into chapters. You can omit the \part lines if you want your highest sectioning level to be the chapter level.

In the Chapters subdirectory, each chapter has its own .tex file; so, you can easily handle a large amount of text. Furthermore, you can use the \includeonly command to compile just the selected chapters for speeding up writing.

Finally, the main document ends with the back matter:

\appendix
\cleardoublepage
\part{Appendix}
\include{Chapters/Chapter0A}
%********************************************************************
% Other Stuff in the Back
%*******************************************************
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Bibliography}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Colophon}
\cleardoublepage\include{FrontBackmatter/Declaration}
\end{document}

The command \appendix resets the sectioning counters and changes them to alphabetic numbering, that is, the following chapters will be numbered A, B, and so on. Like in the front matter, the parts of the appendix are divided into several files.

Let's take a look at the configuration file. Open the classicthesis-config.tex file. The whole thing would take too much space in the book, so let's just take a look at some sample lines:

\newcommand{\myTitle}{A Classic Thesis Style\xspace}
\newcommand{\myName}{Andr\'e Miede\xspace}
\newcommand{\myUni}{Put data here\xspace}
\newcommand{\myLocation}{Darmstadt\xspace}
\newcommand{\myTime}{August 2012\xspace}

Here, you can fill in your own data. Besides being printed on the title page, this data will be used as metadata for the generated PDF document. There are more supported macros here, such as \mySubtitle, \myProf, and many more. The \xspace takes care of proper spacing after such a macro; that is, it inserts a space when there's no punctuation mark following it.

As mentioned, this template contains design decisions inspired by the book The Elements of Typographical Style by Robert Bringhurst. The most notable design decisions are as follows:

Explore the classicthesis-config.tex file further to make modifications. Like in the previous recipe, we apply document-wide changes within the preamble, and here, we do it in this file.

We will now take a look at the selected lines of that configuration file.

\PassOptionsToPackage{latin9}{inputenc}
\usepackage{inputenc}

\PassOptionsToPackage{eulerchapternumbers,listings,drafting,%
  pdfspacing,%floatperchapter,%linedheaders,%
  subfig,beramono,eulermath,parts}{classicthesis}

\usepackage[inner=1.5cm,outer=3cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm,
  bindingoffset=5mm]{geometry}

\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{format=hang,font=small}

\PassOptionsToPackage{fleqn}{amsmath} 
\usepackage{amsmath}

In the following chapters, you can find a lot of recipes for content elements in your thesis. For a beautiful thesis, elegant tables are of great value, so you may also want to take a look at the Advanced table design recipe in Chapter 5, Beautiful Designs.

As explained in the Writing a short text recipe, our choice will be a KOMA-Script class; only, this time it has the name scrbook.

Perform these steps to start off a book:

At first, we loaded the class scrbook, which was specifically made for writing books. So, it is ready for two-sided printing with meaningful margins and good proportions of headings and text.

Besides the class's default settings, we chose a font size of 11 pt and A5 paper size, which is handy for a book. The pagesize=auto option is important here as it ensures that the A5 printing area will be taken over to the PDF page size.

Then, we did the following things, which will be explained in more detail at the beginning of Chapter 2, Tuning the Text:

The last package we loaded is the blindtext. You don't need it in your final document; here, it will serve us to provide filler text. Using such dummy text, we can get a better idea of the final result before writing the actual content.

Finally, we switched to the so-called French spacing, which means that after ending a sentence, we will get a normal interword space, not a wider space.

You can change the layout of the book in many ways. Choose your settings at the beginning, or even better—start writing your content without any hesitation—once you have a decent amount of text, you can better see the effects of layout changes. You can do this at any time. Let's take a look at some design ideas.

\documentclass[fontsize=11pt,paper=a5,pagesize=auto,
  BCOR=5mm,DIV=12]{scrbook}

\usepackage[inner=1.5cm,outer=3cm,top=2cm,bottom=4cm,
  bindingoffset=5mm]{geometry}

\begin{titlepage}
  \vspace*{1cm}
  {\huge\raggedright The Book\par}
  \noindent\hrulefill\par
  {\LARGE\raggedleft The Author\par}
  \vfill
  {\Large\raggedleft Institute\par}
\end{titlepage}

A book may contain other elements, such as an index, a glossary, and a bibliography. Refer to Chapter 7, Contents, Indexes, and Bibliographies, which contains such recipes.

We will start off with a sample presentation document, which we can extend. Follow the given steps:

We loaded the beamer class and chose the theme with the name Warsaw. You can easily replace it with another theme's name, compile it, and cycle through the themes until you find the best one for your occasion. By default, the following themes are installed:

You can see these themes in the gallery at http://latex-beamer.net. We specified the title, subtitle, author, and date of the seminar, which is then printed by \titlepage. We used a frame environment, which we have to use for each slide.

The next frame contains the table of contents. We provided the frame title Outline as an argument to the frame in curly braces. For the \tableofcontents command, we added the pausesections option. As a result of doing this, section titles are printed one-by-one with a pause in between. This gives us the opportunity to explain what the audience will hear before they read further.

Here, we used the \section and \subsection commands just like in a normal LaTeX document. The heading is not directly printed. The sections and subsections are printed in the frame margin with the current position highlighted.

To get a bulleted list, we used an itemize environment just as we would in a normal LaTeX document. The environments enumerate for numbered lists and description for descriptive lists also work in the beamer frames.

To highlight information, we used the so-called block environments. Besides the standard block environment, we can use the exampleblock and alertblock commands to get a different style or color. The chosen theme determines the appearance of those blocks.

The \alert command is used to emphasize more distinctly, as seen in the last frame.

Now, you have the template and tools to create your presentation.

The beamer package has unique capabilities and an extraordinary design. We will explore it in the following pages.

\title[Short title]{Long Informative Title}
\author[Shortened name]{Author's Complete Name}
\date[2015/06/24]{Conference on X at Y, June 24, 2015}

Text\pause more text\pause\includegraphics{filename}

\uncover<3->{Surprise!}

\includegraphics<3->{filename}

\begin{frame}
  Some text which can use whole frame width
  \begin{columns}[t]
    \begin{column}{0.45\textwidth}
      Sample text in\\
      two lines
    \end{column}
    \begin{column}[T]{0.45\textwidth}
      \includegraphics[width=3cm]{filename}
    \end{column}
  \end{columns}
\end{frame}

\AtBeginSection{
  \begin{frame}{Outline}
    \tableofcontents[currentsection]
  \end{frame}}

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

\usefonttheme{serif}

\usecolortheme{dolphin}

\documentclass[handout]{beamer}

\usepackage{pgfpages}
\pgfpagesuselayout{4 on 1}[a4paper,
  border shrink=5mm,landscape]

\pgfpagesuselayout{2 on 1}[a4paper,border shrink=5mm]

For the best quality with included graphics, refer to Chapter 4, Working with Images. In Chapter 9, Creating Graphics, you can find recipes for quickly creating diagrams and charts, which are good tools for visualizing data in a presentation.

If it's not already installed on your computer, download and install moderncv from CTAN (http://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv).

If your TeX installation provides a package manager, use it for the installation.

There's a directory of examples, containing templates which you can use. Either locate it in the documentation branch of your TeX directory tree, or visit the preceding CTAN link for downloading.

We will start using a sample file provided by the moderncv package. Perform these steps:

We loaded the moderncv package. We used 11 pt as the base font size; 10 pt and 12 pt are also supported. We selected A4 paper; other paper size options are a5paper, letterpaper, legalpaper, and executivepaper. You can also add the landscape option. We chose a sans serif font, which is fine for such lists; alternatively, you could write Roman alphabets for a serif font.

We selected the classic style. Other available styles are casual, oldstyle, and banking.

Our color style is blue. Other color options are orange, green, red, purple, gray, and black.

We loaded the geometry package with a scaling factor for reducing the margins.

Using macros such as the \name and \address, we entered our personal data.

The \photo command includes our photo; the size options are the height to which it is scaled and the thickness of the frame around the photo. In this recipe, we used the CTAN lion drawn by Duane Bibby for the photo.

The document body is divided into sections and subsections, just with a special design.

Then, the \cventry command makes a typical resume entry for job or education. Use it as follows:

\cventry[spacing]{years}{job title}
  {employer}{localization}{detail}{job description}

Otherwise, you can use the following:

\cventry[spacing]{years}{degree}
  {institution}{localization}{grade}{comment}

You can leave the last four arguments empty if you don't need them.

A simpler line is created using \cvitem, as follows:

\cvitem[optional spacing length{header}{text}

The \cvitemwithcomment command works in a similar way, just with another argument that is printed at the right.

If you are looking for deeper information beyond this quick start guide, some more commands and options are explained in the very well-documented template.tex file, as well as in the class file moderncv.cls itself.

The template file contains a letter template that you can use for an application. Another approach is explained in the next recipe.

We will use a KOMA-Script class, which has been specifically designed for letters, named scrlttr2. Take a look at the following steps:

That was pretty easy! You got a fully fledged formal letter with addressing information, an envelope window support, date of writing, phrases, signature, and even fold marks.

Now you can enter the real addresses and the actual letter text.

When loading the letter class scrlttr2, we activated the address field, switched on fold marks, and set the options for aligning the sender's address to the right.

The scrlttr2 class is quite different from other classes, so it has a special interface. Using the \setkomavar command, we set the content of class variables, similar to the \renewcommand command. Here, we set the name and address. The KOMA-Script manual explains all the available variables. As mentioned in the recipe Writing a book, you can open it by typing the texdoc scrguien command in Command Prompt, or online at http://texdoc.net/pkg/scrguien.

We used a letter environment for the actual content, including the opening and closing phrases. The address is a mandatory argument for that environment. You can have several letter environments in a single document.

For improving input and hyphenation, and for changing the font, take a look at the first recipe in Chapter 2, Tuning the Text.

Let's take a look at some letter specific options.

parskip=full

\setkomavar{signature}{Thomas}

\renewcommand{\raggedsignature}{\raggedright}

\encl{Curriculum vitae, certificates}

\setkomavar*{enclseparator}{Attached}

The intended layout is very different compared to the already shown document types. Fortunately, there's a document class for it with the name leaflet, which we will use now. Let's start filling it with some content. Let's take a look at the following steps:

The back side still contains just some dummy text, which helps to identify the position where the text finally lands on the page.

In the first line, we loaded the leaflet package with a font size of 10 pt. The notumble option suppresses the default behavior, that is, printing the back side upside down.

The next three lines contain our font settings. We used the Linux Libertine font and specified the T1 font encoding. You can read more about encodings in Chapter 2, Tuning the Text, specifically in the Improving justification and hyphenation recipe. Furthermore, we set the default font family to be sans serif. I prefer the clean look of sans serif on a flyer or a leaflet, which usually contains little text.

The remaining part of the preamble is as follows:

Our document body shows usual sectioning commands and text. You can see that we added an explicit space after the TeX logo by inserting a backslash and a following space. That's because the space after a macro, such as the \TeX command, just indicates the end of the macro. It doesn't produce a space in print because punctuation may follow the macro.

To have an image in our template, we used the CTAN lion drawn by Duane Bibby; simply replace it with your own image, for example, a geographic map or logo.

The remaining text is straightforward and shows some useful layout details, as follows:

In the \begin{tabular}{@{}rl@{}} line, the characters rl stand for two columns, where the first one is right aligned and the second one is left aligned. The expression @{code} inserts a piece of code instead of the space before or after the column, so @{} replaces it with nothing, that means, removes it. We got two columns without additional whitespaces on the left or right, saving our previous line space.

The leaflet class provides some options and commands for customization.

\documentclass[10pt,notumble,nofoldmark]{leaflet}

\CutLine{3}

\setmargins{top}{bottom}{left}{right}

\AddToBackground{pagenumber}{\includegraphics{filename}}

\renewcommand{\sectfont}{\large\sffamily\bfseries\color{blue}}

We will use the tikzposter class. The document is structured in columns and blocks. Follow these steps:

The tikzposter package supports large paper sizes, large fonts, and it takes care of block heights and spacing between columns. We, as users, just decided the relative column width.

Several class options are provided. You can add them to the \documentclass command like we did with the preceding landscape option. Let's take a look at the following:

You can adjust several lengths using different options. Give them as class options in the key=value form with a measurement unit such as mm or cm:

A sample call using the defaults will be as follows:

\documentclass[a0paper, portrait, 25pt, margin=0mm,
  innermargin=15mm, colspace=15mm, subcolspace=8mm,
  blockverticalspace=15mm]{tikzposter}

The tikzposter package makes use of the very capable graphics language TikZ. We will see more of TikZ in Chapter 9, Creating Graphics. For now, the main benefit is that tikzposter provides a lot of predefined styles and color schemes.

You can use a main layout style by using the \usetheme{name} command. When this book came out, there were nine themes available:

Furthermore, there are predefined styles for color, title, background, notes, blocks, and inner blocks, which can be chosen and composed. There's support for creating further styles.

The commands, which you have seen previously, can be used without support options straight away. However, they can be customized using several options.

The full reference is available by typing the texdoc tikzposter command in Command Prompt, and online at http://texdoc.net/pkg/tikzposter. You can find a style guide, a feature guide, and much more at https://bitbucket.org/surmann/tikzposter/downloads.

One of the first poster classes is a0poster. It actually supports the paper sizes A0, A1, A2, and A3. It provides font sizes from 12 pt up to 107 pt. Math formulas are printed in a suitable size. There's no specific support for graphics, color, or text placement. For this, you would need additional packages, such as TikZ.

In the recipe Creating a presentation, you saw the beamer package as a presentation class. The beamerposter package can be used together with it to produce presentations in poster size. It combines the beamer package with the a0poster code. So, you can produce large posters with a wide range of font sizes together with the beamer package's color and graphics capabilities, such as the beamer boxes with titles.

As mentioned previously, you can use the texdoc command or the Internet site http://texdoc.net to access the documentation of the aforementioned classes and packages.

Another solution is provided by the baposter template. It provides blocks with headings and positioning support. Furthermore, it offers a set of predefined styles. Its download and documentation are available at http://www.brian-amberg.de/uni/poster/.