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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 4: Lists, tables, figures

In this chapter…

  1. A little think about structure
  2. Lists
  3. Tables
  4. Figures
  5. Images
  6. Verbatim text
  7. Boxes, sidebars, and panels

It is perfectly possible to write whole documents using nothing but section headings and paragraphs. As mentioned in § 2.5, novels, for example, usually consist just of chapters divided into paragraphs. However, it's more common to need other features as well, especially if the document is technical in nature or complex in structure.

It's worth pointing out that ‘technical’ doesn't necessarily mean ‘computer technical’ or ‘engineering technical’: it just means it contains a lot of τέχνη, the specialist material or artistry of its field. A literary analysis such as La Textualisation de Madame Bovary (on the marginal notes in the manuscripts of Gustave Flaubert's novel) is every bit as technical in the literary or linguistic field as the maintenance manual for the Airbus 380 is in the aircraft engineering field.

This chapter covers the most common features needed in writing structured documents: lists, tables, figures (including images), sidebars like boxes and panels, and verbatim text (computer program listings). In the chapter ‘Textual tools’ we will cover footnotes, cross-references, citations, and other textual tools.

  1. If your browser font doesn't show it, don't worry: some don't. LATEX will. 

  2. In fact, any time you define a counter in LATEX, you automatically get a command to reproduce its value. So if you defined a new counter example to use in a teaching book, by saying \newcounter{example}, that automatically makes available the command \theexample for use when you want to display the current value of example. 

  3. You may find a lot of old files which use a package called epsf. Don't use it: it's obsolete. 

  4. Some commercial distributions of TEX systems allow other formats to be used, such as GIF, Microsoft Bitmap (BMP), or Hewlett-Packard's Printer Control Language (PCL) files, and others, by using additional conversion software provided by the supplier; but you cannot send such documents to other LATEX users and expect them to work if they don't have the same distribution installed as you have. If you use standard LATEX, stick to EPS. 

  5. Strictly speaking the exact order (from the newest definition in pdftex.def) is .png, .pdf, .jpg, .mps, .jpeg, .jbig2, .jb2, .PNG, .PDF, .JPG, .JPEG, .JBIG2, and .JB2. Thanks to Enrico Gregorio and Philipp Stephani on comp.text.tex for locating this. 

  6. The original term Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is now deprecated in favour of the more accurate Uniform Resource Indicator (URI). For details see http://www.w3.org/Addressing/. Unfortunately the older term still persists, especially in LATEX and XML markup. 

  7. Like this.