The LATEX Graphics Companion: Illustrating Documents with TEX and Postscript (Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting) [Paperback]

The LATEX typesetting system remains a popular choice for typesetting a wide variety of documents, from papers, journal articles, and presentations, to books--especially those that include technical text or demand high-quality composition. This book is the most comprehensive guide to making illustrations in LATEX documents, and it has been completely revised and expanded to include the latest developments in LATEX graphics. The authors describe the most widely used packages and provide hundreds of solutions to the most commonly encountered LATEX illustration problems.

This book will show you how to

• Incorporate graphics files into a LATEX document
• Program technical diagrams using several languages, including METAPOST, PSTricks, and XY-pic
• Use color in your LATEX projects, including presentations
• Create special-purpose graphics, such as high-qualitymusic scores and games diagrams
• Produce complex graphics for a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines

New to this edition:

• Updated and expanded coverage of the PSTricks and METAPOST languages
• Detailed explanations of major new packages for graphing and 3-D figures
• Comprehensive description of the xcolor package
• Making presentations with the beamer class
• The latest versions of gaming and scientific packages

There are more than 1100 fully tested examples that illustrate the text and solve graphical problems and tasks--all ready to run!

All the packages and examples featured in this book are freely downloadable from the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN).

The LATEX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, is more than ever an indispensable reference for anyone wishing to incorporate graphics into LATEX. As befits the subject, the book has been typeset with LATEX in a two-color design.

Michel Goossens is at present responsible for scientific text processing at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion, and also is a past president of the TUG and GUTenberg TeX Users Groups.
     Michel began working at CERN after earning a Ph.D. in physics at Brussels University. At CERN, he soon realized the importance of good documentation and, since the middle 1980s, has been deeply involved with LaTeX. At the same time he has followed closely the development of other generic markup languages and was among the first users of SGML, HTML (invented at CERN), and later XML.

Frank Mittelbach is manager and technical director of the LaTeX3 Project, in which capacity he oversaw the release of LaTeX 2e and more than 15 subsequent releases of this software. In 1989 he joined Electronic Data Systems (EDS), working in a newly formed group for document processing using TeX and other tools. In his current position, he is responsible for concepts and implementation for remote monitoring and management of distributed systems and networks. Frank is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, as well as the editor of the book series in which they appear, Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting.
     Frank studied mathematics and computer science at the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. His interest in the automated formatting of complex documents in general, and in LaTeX in particular, goes back to his university days and has become a major interest, perhaps a vocation, and certainly it is now his "second job." He is author or coauthor of many and varied LaTeX extension packages, such as AMS-LaTeX, doc, multicol, and NFSS: the New Font Selection Scheme. In 1990 Frank presented the paper E-TeX: Guidelines for further TeX extensions, which explained the most critical shortcomings of TeX and argued the need for its further development and for research into the many open questions of automated typesetting. This was the first time the topic of change or extension had been openly discussed within the TeX community and, after getting some early opposition, it helped to spawn several important projects, such as eTEX, Omega, and NTS. He is now interested in bringing together the fruits of these TeX extension developments to get a stable, well-maintained, and widely available successor of TeX on which a future LaTeX3 can be based.

Sebastian Rahtz is information manager for Oxford University Computing Services. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion.
     Sebastian started life in classics, moved to archaeology, and thence to computing. During the 1980s he taught humanities and archaeological computing at Southampton University, where he also came across TeX. The infection grew strong, and he spent most of the 1990s in TeX-related matters, working latterly for Elsevier Science in production support and in LaTeX to SGML conversion. During that time he was heavily involved in the international and UK TeX Users Groups in many capacities, and worked on a variety of LaTeX packages, most notably hyperref. His allegiance today has largely moved to XML, in which capacity he is Oxford's representative on the Board of the Text Encoding Initiative, but he retains a soft spot for the funny backslash and curly bracket language.

Denis Roegel is associate professor in computer science at the University of Nancy. He has been involved in LaTeX for the past 15 years and has a special interest in technical graphics.
     Denis discovered computers in the early 1980s, and after studying mathematics and physics, he earned an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d'Électricité and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy. He later was a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Herbert Voß is a teacher of mathematics, physics and computer science at a German high school and a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. For the past three years, he has been heavily involved in maintaining PSTricks and using PostScript from within LaTeX.
     Herbert studied Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics in Hannover and Berlin. His first experience with a computer was in 1970 with an IBM machine and Algol60. The first text-processing program he used, in 1982, was Wordstar on a microcomputer with an 8080 chip. From this time on, he also was heavily involved in programming for various projects with Turbo Pascal. He came back to PostScript and LaTeX at the end of the 90s.