The Latex Companion (Addison-Wesley Series on Tools and Techniques for Computer T) (Paperback)

by Michel Goossens (Author), Frank Mittelbach (Author), Alexander Samarin (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This companion to Lamport's LaTeX book introduces tools and techniques that will enhance your use of LaTeX and help you format documents more quickly and more efficiently. After positioning standard LaTeX in the framework of the TeX program and its associated utilities, the author shows how to customize commands and environments to suit your needs.

From the Inside Flap
LaTeX is a generic typesetting system that uses TeX as its formatting engine. This companion is a detailed guide through the visible and not-so-visible beauties of LaTeX. As such, it is a comprehensive treatise of those points not fully discussed in Leslie Lamport's LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (henceforth referred to as the LaTeX book) 49. Extensions to basic LaTeX, as described in that book, are discussed, so that the LaTeX book, together with this companion, provide a ready reference to the full functionality of the LaTeX system.

Due to its flexibility, ease of use, and professional typographic quality, LaTeX is presently used in almost all areas of science and the humanities. Unlike many word processors, LaTeX (and its underlying formatting engine TeX) comes free of charge and is not linked to any particular computer architecture or operating system. Since LaTeX source files are plain text files, it is possible to ship them, and the packages referenced, from any computer to any other computer in the world (over electronic networks or via normal mail). The recipient will be able to obtain a final output copy identical to the one generated at the sender's site, independently of the hardware used. Thus members of groups, geographically spread over several sites in different countries, or even on different continents, can now work together in composing complex documents where different parts can be dealt with by different individuals, and then brought together without problems. Moreover, the use of electronic manuscripts has the potential to speed up the publication of papers by publishers.

LaTeX is not difficult to learn and a beginner can benefit from the system after reading through the first few chapters of LamportLeslie Lamport's LaTeX book, the basic reference on LaTeX. After some experience, you will probably have to solve some more advanced problems whose solution cannot be found directly in that book. If you are one of those users who would like to know how LaTeX can be extended to create the nicest documents possible without becoming a (La)TeX guru , then this book is for you.

You will be guided, step by step, through the various important areas of LaTeX and be shown the links that exist between them. The structure of a LaTeX document, the basic formatting tools, and the layout of the page are all dealt with in great detail. A sufficient library of packages in the area of floats, graphics, tables, PostScript, and multi-language support are presented in a convenient way. This book is the first volume to include all of the important LaTeX tools, such as: up-to-date descriptions of version 2 of the New Font Selection Scheme (NFSS2), the AMSLaTeX mathematics extensions, the epic and eepic extensions to LaTeX's picture environment, and the MakeIndex and BibTeX programs for producing and controlling the generation of indices and bibliographic references. Finally, an overview of ways to define new commands and environments, lengths, boxes, general lists, etc., as well as ways of facilitating the handling of these objects, complete the picture.

All three of us have been involved for several years in the support and development of LaTeX applications in various professional environments and countries. We have taught the secrets of LaTeX to many different audiences, and have been listening to the user community by following the discussions in the text processing related news groups and at TeX conferences. This has allowed us to gather a coherent view of a vast collection of subjects, which, we think, you might need one day if you want to fully exploit the richness and strengths of the LaTeX system. Note, however, that this book is not a replacement for, but a companion to, the LaTeX book. You are assumed to have read the first part of that book, and in any case, it should be considered a reference for precise and full description of the LaTeX commands.

To make the presented information even more complete and useful, our readers are kindly invited to send their comments, suggestions, or remarks to any one of the authors. We shall be glad to correct any remaining mistakes or oversights in a future edition, and are open to suggestions for improvements or the inclusion of important developments that we may have overlooked.

LaTeX2e--The New LaTeX Release

Over the years many extensions have been developed for LaTeX with one unfortunate result: incompatible LaTeX formats came into use at different sites. Thus, to process documents from various places, a site maintainer was forced to keep LaTeX (with and without NFSS), SliTeX, AMSLaTeX, and so on. In addition, when looking at a source file it was not always clear what format the document was written for.

To put an end to this unsatisfactory situation a new LaTeX release was announced for fall 1993 that brings all such extensions back under a single format and thus prevents the proliferation of mutually incompatible dialects of LaTeX 2.09. With LaTeX2e the new font selection will be standard and style files like amstex (formerly AMSLaTeX format) or slides (formerly SliTeX format) will become extension packages, all working with the same base format. The introduction of a new release also made it possible to add a small number of often-requested features (like an extended version of #79#>newcommand). All the new possibilities are described in this book, thus allowing you to make full use of the new LaTeX release.

To make it easy to distinguish between old LaTeX 2.09 sources and new sources (making use of new features), the first command in a LaTeX document was changed from \documentstyle to \documentclass, thus enabling the software to automatically detect an old source file and switch to compatibility mode if necessary.

The LaTeX3 Project

LaTeX is presently being rewritten under the coordination of one of the authors (Frank Mittelbach), Chris Rowley and Rainer Schöpf. This endeavor is called the LaTeX3 Project 57. A lot of the functionality described in this book as extensions to basic LaTeX will be available in that system: as part of the kernel, or in one of the extension packages. To help funding, half of the royalties from this book will go directly to the LaTeX3 Project. Therefore, when buying this book, you not only obtain a handy, complete, and up-to-date reference to many important and useful packages available with LaTeX today, but you also actively contribute to making LaTeX more powerful and user-friendly in the future.

How to Read This Book

The titles of the various chapters should convey relatively clearly the subject area addressed in each case. In principle, all chapters can be read more or less independently and, if necessary, pointers are given to where complementary information can be found in other parts of the book.

Chapter 1 gives a short introduction to the LaTeX system.

Chapter 2 discusses generic and document-oriented markup.

Chapter 3 describes LaTeX's basic typesetting commands.

Chapter 4 explains which tools are available to globally define the

visual layout of the pages of a document by using pagestyles.

Chapter 5 shows how to assemble material into columns and rows with

the extended tabular and array environments, and

their multipage equivalents--supertabular and longtable.

Chapter 6 provides a general treatment of floating material.

Chapter 7 discusses in detail LaTeX's New Font Selection Scheme (NFSS2)

and presents its various user commands.

It is shown how to add new fonts, both in math and text mode.

Chapter 8 reviews the amstex package, which adds

many powerful typesetting commands in the field of mathematics.

Chapter 9 looks at the problem of using LaTeX in the multi-language

or non-English environment.

The babel system and other language-specific packages are described.

Chapter 10 addresses the field of device-independent graphics

showing how the epic, eepic and other packages

extend the possibilities

of LaTeX's basic picture environment.

Chapter 11 shows how the PostScript page description language not only

can turn LaTeX into a full-blown graphics utility, but also how it

makes it possible, via the NFSS, for a user to choose a font

from amongst

hundreds of font families, available as PostScript Type 1 outlines.

Chapter 12 tackles the problems associated with preparing an index.

The program MakeIndex is described in detail.

Chapter 13 surveys how LaTeX's companion program BibTeX tries

to solve problems related to maintaining bibliographic data bases.

Various existing bibliographic styles are discussed and the format of the

BibTeX language used in the style files is presented in detail,

allowing the user to customize an existing style.

Chapter 14 shows how to document LaTeX files

using the doc package and its companion program

docstrip.

Appendix 1 first reviews how to handle and manipulate the basic LaTeX programming

structures. The extensions introduced by the calc package

in the field of arithmetic operations, and

extended control structures added to LaTeX2e

are discussed.

Appendix 2 explains how to get the files described in this book

from the various TeX archives or from the TeX Users Groups.

In order to make the examples as independent as possible from basic TeX, extensive use has been made of the packages calc and ifthen, which are described in the appendices A.4 and A.5. You should study the extensions to LaTeX, introduced in these packages, if you want to understand how many of the examples in this book function in detail.

Many examples make use of new features in LaTeX2e; especially font changes for text are all done in LaTeX2e style, i.e.,with the commands shown in table 7.2 on page 171. Abbreviated forms, like {\bf word} are normally not used, since they are style defined commands and may or may not be available for all classes of documents.

While it is certainly possible to make good use of most parts of this book within a LaTeX 2.09 environment (the event of LaTeX2e happened after 90% of the book was finished) we suggest that you upgrade to the new version as soon as possible so that the worldwide community of LaTeX users again speaks a single language. As said above, LaTeX2e is able to identify and process old documents written for LaTeX 2.09. However, packages written or updated for LaTeX2e will not run with the old system.

Typographic Conventions

As explained in the discussion about the links between content and form or generic and layout markup, it is essential that the presentation of the material conveys immediately its function in the framework of the text. Therefore, we present below the typographic conventions used in this book.

LaTeX command and environment names are in monospaced type (for example, #133#>caption, enumerate, \begin{tabular}), while names of package and class files are in sans-serif type (eg. article).

The syntax of LaTeX constructs is presented inside a rectangular box. Command arguments are shown in italic type.

\commandname{arg1}{arg1}{arg3}

Lines containing examples with LaTeX commands are indented and are typeset in a monospaced type at a size somewhat smaller than that of the main text. \chapter{Title of the Chapter} \section{Section Title} Some text...

When it is important to show the result of a series of commands, then the input and output are shown side by side as follows:

For large examples, where the input and output cannot be shown conveniently alongside one another, the following layout is used:

Commands to be typed by the user on a computer terminal are shown in monospaced type and are underlined, e.g.,: This is user input.

Using All Those Packages

In this book we describe over 150 packages and options that extend or modify LaTeX's basic possibilities. In order to show their action, we (in principle) have to load them all at the same time. For various reasons that is impractical, if not impossible. Indeed many packages, like program, use up a lot of counters, and TeX only allows a total of 256 counters. Therefore, when you hit this limit you must reduce the number of files you load simultaneously. In the production of this book we used a different strategy: we prepared some of the examples as separate files and included them as Encapsulated PostScript. Moreover, we used the package hackalloc. It redefines the allocation primitive so that all allocation becomes group-local. This means that by loading packages only when they are needed inside a brace group, the counter and length variables will be deallocated when you exit from the group. This procedure, however, can have some side effects, and should only be used with great care. However, we used most of the packages together, with the result that we had to recompile TeX several times during the preparation of this book. One of the log files produced during the last steps of the preparation showed the following summary: Here is how much of TeX's memory you used: 9692 strings out of 16716 118315 string characters out of 133654 236569 words of memory out of 262141 8131 multiletter control sequences out of 9500 81058 words of font info for 228 fonts, out of 90000 for 255 20 hyphenation exceptions out of 607 34i,23n,41p,509b,1403s stack positions out of 300i,40n,60p,3000b,4000s Output written on companion.dvi (555 pages, 2008780 bytes). As you can see, we nearly reached the font limit (which cannot be raised further) because of the many fonts shown in chapter 7, and the usage for strings, characters, main memory, and control sequences is probably much higher than in any LaTeX run you ever made. This is not surprising given that the whole book is produced in a single LaTeX run with all those packages working together to produce the examples.

Even when you do not reach a limit of the kind mentioned above, there are other interference effects between different packages. For instance, some extensions such as french make some characters active (i.e.,some characters act as though they were control sequences) . Problems may result when such a character is then encountered in another package. This means that not all of the packages described in this book can be used together. Sometimes you can solve the problem by loading problematic packages as one of the last #161#>usepackage declarations. Also, some packages make the @ character active (eg.amstex), and this can have nasty consequences if you load other packages that use the @ character.

As a rule of thumb, if you observe some odd behavior when you add a package to an existing list of packages, which seemed to work nicely together before, there might be a compatibility problem. Try loading the new file at the end, and if that does not work, take out each of the other files one by one. In this way you might find the file or files that are responsible for the problem.

0201541998P04062001

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition (December 31, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201541998
• ISBN-13: 978-0201541991
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #584,122 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All the things you wish were written in Lamport's guide, April 29, 2000

By	Primoz Peterlin (Ljubljana, Slovenia) - See all my reviews

First, a remark on the title: this is not a companion to theprogram, but rather a companion to some other book on LaTeX you shouldhave. I bought this book back in 1994, when it was the first book onLaTeX2e, and by now it is thoroughly worn (though the binding is still doing its job well :). However, at the time I bought it, I have already been using LaTeX for six years, and have read Lamport's guide (which is charming, and also the book The Companion intends to accompany) and Kopka and Daly's (which is better organized and more complete).

The LaTeX Companion is something between an advanced course tutorial (could just as well be named Selected Chapters from LaTeX) and a reference book. None of them was ever aimed at beginners, and this one is no exception. LaTeX comes with a rich legacy of add-on macro packages doing various useful and nifty things with lists, floats, tables, formulas, graphics, fonts, indices and bibliographies. This book covers some of them. I would love to see second edition of this book covering more of them. There is a treasure hidden at CTAN, but it is usually hard to find it. The examples are well chosen and it is easy to learn from them. I am less pleased with the index. At 36 pages, it looks very promising, but it rarely led me to the place I sought. During years of use, I mostly figured out where in a book things are, and stopped using it.

Despite the confusing index, the book is worth its (admittedly high) price and you will probably learn many useful things from it. The idea of a thin tutorial and a partly-overlapping "companion book" doesn't appeal to me, though. Personally, I would prefer one single book with a complete treatment of the topic.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars not perfect, but indispensible, September 19, 2000

By	Mayer Goldberg (Beer Sheva, Negev Israel) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The bottom line is: This is the most useful book on latex2e that I own. I use it all the time. This is not a great book, but there aren't many good books on latex2e and this is probably the best or close to best there is.

There aren't good books on latex; there are very few good books on tex. People don't buy these books because they're fun or interesting, or make good reading, but because they need to get things done and they want the book to show them how. The latex companion will show you how to get things done. If you need to typeset latex documents often, probably "pure latex" in itself won't be enough for you, and the book will make you aware of this fact: It surveys some of the more useful packages for doing useful things: long tables, inserting and manipulating graphics, etc. Once you get the hang of going over to CTAN, checking for useful packages that do the stuff you need, downloading and installing them, you'll be "on your own" and will be able to progress independently. I haven't found a need for another latex manual beyond the Latex Companion, though an O'Reilly pocket reference for tex and latex would have been great! (O'Reilly: Are you reading this???) There are some subjects it doesn't treat well, like foreign languages in latex, but otherwise, it's fine. Another downside is that the book doesn't treat the issues of pdf generation, html generation and hyperlinks, which are becoming very popular in latex circles.

Get this book, and you will probably not need another latex book until the O'Reilley pocket reference to tex and latex comes out.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good, but NOT for beginners, December 21, 1999

By	Justo S. - See all my reviews

If you are a beginner in LaTeX, better look for another book. If you have experience on the subject and want something to help you writing your thesis (as my case) or higher level things (or want to know deeply LaTeX), this book is for you.