The LaTeX Companion
by Frank Mittelbach · first published 2004
50% recommend50% neutral
Written by the core LaTeX developers and maintainers, this essential reference contains more than 900 self-contained ready-to-run examples that can immediately be reused by readers.
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Secret to understanding/using LaTeX is to have at hand two books: Guide to LaTeX by Kopka and Daly, and The LaTeX Companion by Mittelbach and Goossens. That plus a project to publish (similar to have a task you want to program) should be enough to get you going. The real problem with LaTeX seems to be retention over time without…
on “Discussions on the future of R” ↗"The LaTeX Companion" proved very useful when I wrote my thesis. [http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Companion-Techniques-Computer-Ty...]
on “Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?” ↗…and/or excellent examples of technical writing: * Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" * Velleman's "How To Prove It" and "Philosophies of Mathematics" * Mittelbach & Goosens "The LaTeX Companion" * Waldrop's "The Dream Machine" * Nielsen & Chuang's "Quantum Computation & Quantum Information" * Lakatos's "Proof & Refutations" * Chambers "What is this thing called science?" * Doxiadis & Papadimitriou's…
on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?” ↗As a 20+ years as a more or less casual LaTeX user, I feel your pain. However, some points your mention have workarounds. My first advice would be to invest in getting The LaTeX Companion (https://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Companion-Techniques-Computer-T...). Really, it is the "common things people want or need to do documents" as you said. The third edition is just out of the presses. I have…
on “Beautiful LaTeX Book with Examples” ↗Congrats to all the TeXLive team on a new release. If you're stuck on something LaTeX related, remember there's the latest edition to The LaTex Companion. It even has an appendix explaining the (in)famously cryptic LaTeX/TeX error messages: https://latex-project.org/help/books/ There's also, among other resources, the great LaTeX Font Catalogue: https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/…
on “TeX Live 2026 is available for download now” ↗…0-321-17385-6, Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2004. and Frank Mittlebach and Michel Goosens with Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, and Chris Rowley, with contributions by Christine Detig and Joachim Schrod, 'The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition', ISBN 0-201-36299-6, Pearson Education, Boston, 2004. and in these two books we do not see Knuth's name. So, can't blane the problems of LaTeX on Knuth or TeX. So, his: "It’s comforting…
on “TNT Is Not TeX” ↗…thanking me for my CV being well-formatted and also short. Ha. I've just noticed that as I type this, I have literally in front of me on my desk Eijkhout's "Tex by Topic", Lamport's latex book and "The Latex Companion" by Goosens et al. This must be where I do most of my pretty document making.
on “The lingua franca of LaTeX” ↗I've spent a lot of time using LaTeX, and just purchased the two volume _The LaTeX Companion: 3rd Edition_ --- I've tried more LaTeX replacements than I would care to count and --- still holding out for LaTeX3, we'll see.
on “Two open source projects with great architecture documentation” ↗Who doesn't own the third edition of the LaTeX Companion book?
on “Examples from The LaTeX Companion book (3rd edition)” ↗