Examples from The LaTeX Companion book (3rd edition) | Hacker News Reader

Examples from The LaTeX Companion book (3rd edition)

ctan.org

77 pointsteleforce18 comments

First, anyone who is interested in this should buy the books:

https://www.informit.com/store/latex-companion-parts-i-ii-3r...

I was certainly glad to, since the binding was breaking on my 2nd edition due to constant usage, and I was glad to have the option of buying hardcovers.

Second, work through a good tutorial, there are many, but I like: https://tug.ctan.org/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf

Third, learn your way around CTAN, and https://tex.stackexchange.com/ --- for pretty much any problem you have, there should be a package or code snippet which addresses it, if not ask on SE or https://old.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/ after searching (and let folks know what terminology you used in your search), and consider using one of the nice well-documented documentstyles suited to your project --- Koma is good for Europeans, I like Memoir and not just because the first author was kind enough to consider my suggestions for the manual or implement some simplistic code I sent in (has anyone heard from Peter Wilson lately?)

Lastly, when working with macros and packages and so forth, conceptually divide them between semantic markup (this bit of code describes how this text/number should be represented and thought of) and appearance (this bit of code is necessary to get the text on the page at this pagination state in the best possible way) --- all of the latter macros should be defined twice, once as null ops in one package file, a second time redefined to actually do what is desired in a second package --- that way, the page can be set without them just by commenting out the second package. It's even better if all such macros are named in such a way that they can be easily commented out w/ a find-replace.

> First, anyone who is interested in this should buy the books:

> https://www.informit.com/store/latex-companion-parts-i-ii-3r...

I'm getting "Sorry, this book is no longer in print."

Here's the link to the in-print version:

https://www.informit.com/store/latex-companion-parts-i-ii-97...

My apologies, didn't notice that the hardcover was out-of-print and that the paperback is what is available:

https://www.informit.com/store/latex-companion-part-i-978013...

Regarding the idea to have some macros that expand to null when unwanted -- I have some "developer" macros that, in day-to-day use, do things like showing TODO items.

The most useful one typesets the labels of equations, sections, figures, and so forth, so I can copy-paste right from the document as I'm editing. That makes it so much easier to insert cross-references while writing, without breaking the flow to search out the definition.

Rather than commenting out packages, I have two top-level input files, which `\input{}` the actual content. Those files differ only where they read the developer-oriented definitions:

    \input{latex_input/defn/dev_defns_for_devs.tex}

versus

    \input{latex_input/defn/dev_defns_for_release.tex}

Looks like there's an update to the tutorial:

https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

> should buy the books

Yes I totally will, err..., oh my, ebook for $91.99, paperback for $127.99. What's going on with these prices? These aren't college textbooks. I'm glad to hear about the 3rd edition but the cost gives me pause.

I recall them being less expensive when first released.

Either there has been a new printing which was done overseas and was affected by tariffs or more expensive for some other reason, or the copies in the warehouse were taxed as inventory (blame Congress for that, it was a major change in the tax law and it created the current mess of remaindered books and no back-list and ever spiraling book prices).

> has anyone heard from Peter Wilson lately?

Unfortunately, he seems to have gone missing [0].

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb46-1/tb142beet.pdf

This[1] is what I use. So far haven't needed anything that's not supported by Katex. and Pandoc doesn't seem to have any problem with converting my stuff to Latex.

The only real problems I ever ran into were due to markdown (errors?) that vscode preview ignores but pandoc trips over. Mostly having to do with not leaving blank lines between different Markdown elements.

[1]: https://katex.org/docs/supported.html

KaTeX and MathJax aren't really the same as (La)TeX at all though---they support the same math syntax, but LaTeX is a complete document processing system while KaTeX is just a math renderer.

KaTeX + Markdown is comparable to LaTeX, in the same way that notepad.exe is comparable to an IDE---they both do the same thing, but one has 1000× as many features as the other. I'm personally biased towards LaTeX, but simpler solutions like Markdown certainly have their place.

Not sure why is this posted here, pretty much useless without the book

Who doesn't own the third edition of the LaTeX Companion book?

Hmm, I guess most people. Just like TAOC, everybody talk about it and even those who buy it let it rot on a shelve.

I remember in university one of the professor coming to me during my master asking how did I achieved this fancy stuff in my report. Dude I just red the book, lol. I didn't manage to validate my M2 though, double lol. :D

Well, it's a reference book, not a tutorial. You "let it rot on a shelve" until that moment when you need to achieve a specific outcome in your LaTeX code and then check out the book.

Just when I started to look back at latex to typeset some poetry of mine yesterday!

Been a while since I didn't touch it, so I didn't even have texlive installed on my Ubuntu box, and started a chase of dependency to make my French specific stuff to install. I still need to see if I can manage to make the three strophe I wrote be as rectangle shaped as possible, be it with automatic line break on a vers (not sure the term in English) to the next row right aligned and preceded with a [

I'm not 100% sure what you're looking for, but placing "\parfillskip=0pt" at the start of the paragraph will make the last line end on the right margin, which I think is what you mean by "rectangle shaped".

There are packages that support poetry directly.

And if you’ve not seen the memoir package collection it (and the accompanying ebook on typesetting) is worth a look.

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