Product Description

Provides expert advice on using Latex's basic formatting tools for creating all types of publications. Includes in-depth coverage of important extension packages for tabular and technical typesetting. Previous edition: c1994. Softcover.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23935 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1120 pages

From the Back Cover

The LaTeX Companion has long been the essential resource for anyone using LaTeX to create high-quality printed documents. This completely updated edition brings you all the latest information about LaTeX and the vast range of add-on packages now available--over 200 are covered! Full of new tips and tricks for using LaTeX in both traditional and modern typesetting, this book will also show you how to customize layout features to your own needs--from phrases and paragraphs to headings, lists, and pages.

Inside, you will find:

• Expert advice on using LaTeX's basic formatting tools to create all types of publications--from memos to encyclopedias
• In-depth coverage of important extension packages for tabular and technical typesetting, floats and captions, multicolumn layouts--including reference guides and discussion of the underlying typographic concepts
• Detailed techniques for generating and typesetting contents lists, indexes, etc.

New to this edition:

• Nearly 1,000 fully tested examples that illustrate the text and solve typographical and technical problems--all ready to run!
• An additional chapter on citations and bibliographies
• Expanded material on the set up and use of fonts to access a wide range of glyphs, plus other information for LaTeX programmers and systems support
• Major new packages for graphics, "verbatim" listings, and page layout
• Full coverage of the latest packages for all types of documents--mathematical, multilingual, and many more.
• Detailed help on all error messages, including those troublesome low-level TeX errors

Like its predecessor, The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, is an indispensable reference for anyone wishing to use LaTeX productively.

The accompanying CD-ROM contains a complete plug-and-play LaTeX installation, including all the packages and examples featured in the book

About the Author

Frank Mittelbach is manager of the LaTeX3 Project, in which capacity he oversaw the release of LaTeX 2e. He is the editor of a series of publications on tools and techniques for computer typesetting.

Michel Goossens is past president of the TeX Users Group. A research physicist at CERN, where the Web paradigm was born, he is responsible for LaTeX, HTML, SGML, and, more recently, XML support for scientific documents.

0201362996AB11202003

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A full decade has passed since the publication of the first edition of The LATEX Companion--a decade during which some people prophesied the demise of TEX and LaTEX and predicted that other software would take over the world. There have been a great many changes indeed, but neither prediction has come to pass: TEX has not vanished and the interest in LaTEX has not declined, although the approach to both has gradually changed over time.

When we wrote the Companion in 1993, we intended to describe what is usefully available in the LaTEX world (though ultimately we ended up describing what was available at CERN in those days). As an unintentional side effect, the first edition defined for most readers what should be available in a then-modern LaTEX distribution. Fortunately, most of the choices we made at that time proved to be reasonable, and the majority (albeit not all) of the packages described in the first edition are still in common use today. Thus, even though "the book shows its age, it still remains a solid reference in most parts", as one reviewer put it recently.

Nevertheless, much has changed and a lot of new and exciting functionality has been added to LaTEX during the last decade. As a result, while revising the book we ended up rewriting 90% of the original content and adding about 600 additional pages describing impressive new developments.

What you are holding now is essentially a new book--a book that we hope preserves the positive aspects of the first edition even as it greatly enhances them, while at the same time avoiding the mistakes we made back then, both in content and presentation (though doubtless we made some others). For this book we used the CTAN archives as a basis and also went through the comp.text.tex news group archives to identify the most pressing questions and queries.

In addition to highlighting a good selection of the contributed packages available on the CTAN archives, the book describes many aspects of the basic LaTEX system that are not fully covered in the LATEX Manual, Leslie Lamport's LATEX: A Document Preparation System. Note, however, that our book is not a replacement for the LATEX Manual but rather a companion to it: a reader of our book is assumed to have read at least the first part of that book (or a comparable introductory work, such as the Guide to LATEX) and to have some practical experience with producing LaTEX documents.

The second edition has seen a major change in the authorship; Frank took over as principal author (so he is to blame for all the faults in this book) and several members of the LaTEX3 project team joined in the book's preparation, enriching it with their knowledge and experience in individual subject areas. The preparation of the book was overshadowed by the sudden death of our good friend, colleague, and prospective co-author Michael Downes, whose great contributions to LaTEX, andAMS-LaTEX in particular, are well known to many people. We dedicate this book to him and his memory.

Frank Mittelbach
Michel Goossens
Johannes Braams
David Carlisle
Chris Rowley
February 2004

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Customer Reviews

A True Companion
Pocket Review: *The* bible to keep on your desk if you use LaTex.

I love type. Ever since I got into computers, back when high resolution was a 132 column printer, I've tried to find ways to play with typesetting and fonts. I wrote a basic layout system in OMSI Pascal that drove daisywheel printers. I got to be quite an expert at nroff and troff. I used to hunt (without success) for a free copy of Scribe. I played with Lout, and a dozen other packages. But nothing, ever, held a candle to TeX when it comes to the quality of the output it produces.

Ignore for the moment some of the uglier fonts than some TeX users employ, and look instead at the pages. Hold them up at a distance and admire the uniformity of the gray: no rivers of white to be seen. Look at the bottoms of the page: if the typesetter didn't totally goof off, they'll be vertically balanced: an open spread is
the same height on both pages (TeX'll add tiny amounts of leading to make it happen). Dig into the line-breaking, and you'll find optimization algorithms, which shuffle words back and forth trying to minimize the badness of the appearance.

The output of TeX gives me a lot of pleasure.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its input. Don Knuth is clearly a genius, but as with all wizards, his creations can be tricky. In the case of TeX, we have a typesetting engine driven by a macro processor whose interpretation of syntax can be changed while it is in the middle of processing individual commands. Raw TeX is scary to deal with, so people don't deal with it. Instead, they use its power to write macro packages, abstracting the low level commands into something more palatable (and tractable). The most widely used of these is Leslie Lamport's LaTeX. LaTeX is at its heart a logical mark up system, documented in an admirably short and lucid book, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System.

But when you want to use LaTeX to do serious work, you need more than this small book. When you want to set complex tables, or handle floating material a certain way, or get your index looking just right, you need the real scoop. And you turn to just one book.

The original LaTeX Companion was one of those books that never got returned to my bookshelf. I used it almost every day for 4 years during the typesetting of five books. Thanks to its wealth of detail, I was able to create press-ready files straight from my computer to the exacting specification of the production departments of three separate printers.

But now, that worn old book has been retired. Mittlebach and Goossens have
produced a second edition of The LaTeX Companion, and it's better in every possible way. In the ten years since the first was published, a lot has changed, and the book captures it all. New packages, improvements in encodings, font handling, xindy: the book describes it all. My copy arrived a couple of weeks before
Mike Clark's Pragmatic Project Automation book was due to go to the printers. I devoured it, and immediately used its advice to improve the appearance of ragged-right text, fix up some font issues in the code listings, and improve the handling of included graphics. Since then, it's been a true companion as I've worked with the typesetting of the new edition of Programming Ruby.

I don't often gush, but if you use LaTeX, or if you'd just like to produce great looking typeset output, you owe it to yourself to get this book.

An Outstanding Book
This is, by far, the most useful book I own. The first edition was great, the second edition is nothing short of spectacular. The two-color print is very helpful. Compared to the first edition, which I've been using for just about seven years, the updated package descriptions in the new edition improved my typesetting substantially within only a few days after I got it. Well worth it's price. I hope the authors make a good buck on this, since they are making my life so much easier.

The stated intention of the book not withstanding, I think this is all you'll ever need to use LaTeX, no matter how serious a user you are. Well, maybe a two-page primer of the basic commands in addition. Anyway, I've never used Kopka's book and I never touched Lamport's. Not because they're bad, but because I never had to.

The one small issue I have with the second edition: where did the cute pooch on the cover go?

Finally here - GET YOURS TODAY
I have been a TeX/LaTeX user since 1982, and have authored several classes and styles (newlfm). I just got my copy of the new The LaTeX Companion (2nd Edition). I just love it!! Why? 942 pages of text, 94 pages of the index (YEP!), wonderfully clear examples, 136 pages on fonts, a whole appendix on debugging, 72 pp on mathematics, etc. The book is well-written and uses clearly distinct fonts for user commands, internal commands, etc. There are 138 pages about fonts. In the mathematics chapter, there are 104 examples in the Math chapter alone; one REALLY COOL section shows 10 different font choices and their impact on the typesetting of a small page of mathematics. HOT STUFF!!

In short, there is only 1 limitation to the book: It does not have LaTeX/TeX lion on the front. That is hard to accept. However, everything else is really good. I highly recommend this.