Document and page organisation

• Document classes: The standard classes are article, book, letter, report, slides. The differences between these are often minor. A book can have chapters. In a report sections begin at 0 whereas in an article they begin at 1. Just about all our handouts are articles.

• Big Documents :- It's best to split your document into smaller files and have a master file looking like this

   \documentclass[dvips,12pt]{book}
   \usepackage{a4,color,graphics,palatino,fancyhdr}
   \begin{document}
   \pagestyle{empty}
   \tableofcontents
   \listoffigures
   \pagestyle{fancy}
   \input{chapter1}
   \input{chapter2}
   \input{fig2}
   \input{chapter3}
   \input{chapter4}
   \appendix
   \input{appendices}
   \end{document}
  

  on which you can run latex just as if the master file contained all the text of chapter1.tex etc. The advantage of this is that once you have a chapter correct, you can comment out the corresponding `input' line and avoid unnecessary processing. Remember to take out the \begin{document} and \end{document} lines from the component files.

• Page Size :- You can choose the margin sizes yourself by changing the following dimensions before the \begin{document} line.

  \setlength{\topmargin}{-0.4in}
  \setlength{\topskip}{0.3in}    % between header and text
  \setlength{\textheight}{9.5in} % height of main text
  \setlength{\textwidth}{6in}    % width of text
  \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0.75in} % odd page left margin
  \setlength{\evensidemargin}{0.75in} % even page left margin
  

  Note that a margin width of 0cm gives you a margin 4cm wide. Rather than set absolute sizes you can modify the default sizes using commands like the following -

  \addtolength{\evensidemargin}{-1cm}
  \addtolength{\oddsidemargin}{-1cm}
  \addtolength{\textwidth}{2cm}
  

  Further support for control of page layout is provided by the geometry package. To see the current values of these dimensions, use the layout package, which defines a \layout command.

  For A3 output, add \usepackage{a3} to your latex source file (foo.tex say), run latex on it, convert the resulting file to Postscript using ``dvips -t a3 foo.dvi -ofoo.ps'' then print using ``lp -oa3 -dljmr2 foo.ps''.

• Title Pages :- The title page of this document was created by the following L^ATEX commands.

  \title{Advanced \LaTeX}
  \author{Tim Love}
  \date{\today}
  \maketitle
  

• Contents :- Use \tableofcontents to create a contents list at that point in the document. L^ATEX will pick out the sections, subsections, etc for you. You'll have to run L^ATEX at least twice though.

• Page numbers and Headings :- These are determined by the argument given in pagestyle{}.

  plain :-

  the page numbers are put at the bottom of the page. The top of the page is empty. This is the default mode.

  empty :-

  this suppresses page numbering altogether, except on the title page it you're using \maketitle. The workaround in this case is to do

  \maketitle
  \thispagestyle{empty}
  

  with no gap between the two lines.

  headings :-

  this puts the page numbers at the top and adds a header whose contents depend on the document style.

  fancyhdr is a popular package that adds useful page headers when the command \pagestyle{fancy} is used. This handout uses it.

  Long section titles can cause trouble in headers. The section commands let you specify an extra, shorter title for use in the header and contents page. Section 2.3 was specified as follows

  \subsection[Pagebreaks, footnotes, etc]
     {Pagebreaks, space, footnotes, references, boxes, etc}
  

• Sectioning :- To start a chapter called Life in a book, just use \chapter{Life}. Similar commands to start a part, section or subsection also exist in most document classes (articles don't have chapters or parts though).

  If you use the *-form of the command then the sections will not be numbered, neither will it appear in the table of contents.

  A title will only be numbered if its 'depth' isn't more than secnumdepth and will only appear in the contents page if the 'depth' isn't more than the value of tocdepth. So, for example, doing

  \setcounter{tocdepth}{2}
  \setcounter{secnumdepth}{3}
  

  will cause section 1.4.3 to be numbered, but it won't appear in the contents.