Digital typography using LaTeX. With CD-ROM

Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to computer science (68-01) Computing methodologies for text processing; mathematical typography (68U15) Computing methodologies for information systems (hypertext navigation, interfaces, decision support, etc.) (68U35)

Review text

The book presents some of the achievements of TEX community in the last two decades. The TEX resources, made up of a great number and variety of concepts, methods, technologies, and (especially) tools to be applied to diverse domains of typesetting, are available from the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network. This book is addressed both to novice and advanced LaTeX users, desirous to learn to use the system and its variations. The authors refere in the book the names \(\Omega\) and \(\Lambda\), whose meaning is the following: \(\Omega\) is one of the major current TEX projects which takes TEX as the starting point and develops techniques and tools to achieve typesetting in all languages of the world, in particular with the aim of Unicode compliance. Contrarily to \(\Omega\), which is a quite extensive software, \(\Lambda\) stands for the current LaTeX environment, when it is used in conjunction with the \(\Omega\) engine. Presenting the multilingual current capabilities of LaTeX and \(\Lambda\) constitutes a convincing proof that these systems are the best typesetting tools not only for mathematically-oriented texts but for all kinds of documents and all kinds of users! The book is organized in 12 chapters, to which are added six useful appendices. Here it is a brief description of the chapter contents: Chapter 1 (Introduction) explains what LaTeX/\(\Lambda\) system is in general. The advantages of the logical document preparation over the visual document preparation are discussed, being specified the document preparation cycle and the various tools involved. Chapter 2 (The File Structure) presents different characteristics that have a predefined LaTeX meaning and the sectioning commands. The authors illustrate how to prepare the title or the title page of a document, how to produce several logos (e g. tie LaTeX logo), how to prepare acticles, proceedings articles, and how to combine several documents into a single one. Chapter 3 (Fonts and Their Use) discusses about fonts, font shapes, series, and families. Various font selection and symbol commands are considered, together with important symbols, letters of the phonetic alphabet, astronomical symbols, and tools that facilitate the placement of accents over letters. Chapter 4 (Lists and Catalogs) examines how to typeset lists and catalogs, as well as poems, quotations, and others. Details on the customization of these tools are given. Chapter 5 (Typesetting Mathematics) describes the available symbols and the symbol access commands for mathematical typesetting with LaTeX. The necessary tools for creating complete mathematical texts are presented, and the procedure to generate MATHML and hypertext content from \(\Lambda\) sources is exposed. Chapter 6 (More on the Core) contains at die LaTeX features that were not described on the first five chapters. Other topics covered here are: references and hyper-references, commands that generate space, floats, page styles, layout, slide preparation, and the definition of new commands and environments. Chapter 7 (Miscellaneous Packages) presents a number of very useful packages, i.e. tools that extend the functionality of LaTeX (syntax checking, hyphenatable letter spacing etc.). Chapter 8 (Bibliography and Index) shows how to prepare in LaTeX the bibliography and the index of a document, generation of glossaries, including multilingual ones. Chapter 9 (Graphics) introduces a number of tools that allow LaTeX to create simple drawings, picture environment, PICTEX package, METAPOST, including images in LaTeX and in LaTeX and pdfLaTeX files, and creating colourful documents are inspected. Chapter 10 (Multilingual Typesetting) is devoted to describing all the currently available tools for typesetting documents in a variety of languages, and includes the typesetting facilities that are available for around 40 languages or groups of languages. Error handling in LaTeX is treated in Chapter 11 (To Err Is Human), exposing common errors and error recovery strategies. Chapter 12 (Installing New Type) takes into account the necessary steps for successfully installing new fonts, particularly scalable fonts, in the existing TEX installation. Six appendices bring new, concrete information that completes the whole represendation on LaTeX: (A) Using dvips; (B) Visual Editing; (C) Typesetting XML; (D) Web Publishing; (E) New Features introduced to \(\Omega\) 1.23; (F) Solution to All Exercises (scattered along the whole book). The TEXLive CD-ROM that is accompanying this book offers a complete TEX system for Linux, Solaris \(8\times 86\)/SPARC, and Win32 platforms. This encompasses program for typesetting and printing of LaTeX/\(\Lambda\) documents, all the packages described in the book, plus may other useful packages and extensive font libraries. The CD-ROM includes also a largo amount of general documentation about TEX, documents of the specific software packages, and all die book examples (plus a number of selected ones).

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