Creating goodlooking PDFs with LaTeX
Required software
First of all, you'll want to have a complete distribution of LaTeX on your
computer. Some links to LaTeX-distributions which are usable:
| OS | Link | Remarks |
|---|
| Debian GNU/Linux | teTeX
for debian | Just do an apt-get install tetex-base and
you're up and running |
| Mac OS X | TeXGSInstaller.app
| Since Mac OS X has native support for pdf's, you'll want to use
pdfs only, and not bother with dvi. |
| Other Linuxes | ? | Get a teTeX-based packages for your
distribution |
| Windows | MiKTeX | I have no hands-on
experience with this distribution, but it is recommended |
| *BSD | ? | Probably a teTeX or livetex lives somewhere
in the ports. |
If you think you need to create dvi-files and then convert these to pdfs
manually, think again. Use pdflatex, which should be included in
every distribution mentioned above.
One of the problems often encountered in online pdf-files created with
pdflatex is
Now.. how to create nice-looking pdfs? The key element to this is using the
package pslatex. This will make your documents use fonts which
Acrobat Reader is able to render correctly on screen. However, doing this
makes your dvi's look ugly. Simple work-around: copy-paste the following
piece into your preamble:
\newif\ifpdf
\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
\pdffalse
\usepackage[colorlinks=false]{hyperref}
\else
\pdfoutput=1
\pdftrue
\usepackage[pdftex,colorlinks=true,urlcolor=blue,linkcolor=blue]{hyperref}
\pdfcompresslevel=9
\usepackage{pslatex}
\fi
This also includes the package 'hyperref' into your document, which then
generates links in your document where links can be placed, for example, to
footnotes, endnotes, in-text references, from your TOC, etc. Quite
useful.
Another problem is you might want to use output from matlab, gnuplot and/or
other formats in your documents. Don't export anything to a bitmap-based
format if you're using vector-based data (such as graphs, autocad-drawings,
visio-diagrams, etc.). Find out if your software can export to pdf directly,
or encapsulated postscript (eps), or ps. If necessary, when running under
windows, you can install a postscript printer driver and then choose the
'print to file' option. All unix-like platform should be printing to
postscript anyway, or you're running a severely brain-damaged unix.
Once you have postscript pictures, convert them to pdf-pictures, using
ps2pdf, eps2pdf, pstopdf, or how these programs are called in your
environment. Now you can include them hassle-free in your documents using
the graphicx package:
\begin{figure}[b]
\includegraphics[width=3cm]{naamvanfilezonderextensie}
\label{picrefplaatje}
\caption{Een mooi plaatje}
\end{figure}
Easy!
Yes, the default latex pageheaders look ugly and are somewhat sucky in
general (however, this is a matter of taste of course). Read the excellent
documentation on the fancyhdr package, and use it.
Also something which has to do with taste - in any case, I don't like the
way most headers look, so I have (some variation of) the following code in
the preamble of most of my documents:
\makeatletter
\def\section{\@startsection {section}{1}{\z@}{3.0ex plus 1ex minus
.8ex}{2ex plus 1ex minus .6ex}{\sf\Large}}
\def\subsection{\@startsection {subsection}{2}{\z@}{2.0ex plus 1ex minus
.4ex}{1.5ex plus 1ex minus .4ex}{\sf\large}}
\makeatother
More information to come here on request - time to sleep for me though ;)
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