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The LaTeX Graphics Companion (Second Edition)

Supplementary material

The second edition of the LaTeX Graphics Companion has been published in August 2007. With respect to the first edition (1997), the material has been very much expanded, and the contents has been focussed on the graphics packages. For lack of space the chapters on PostScript fonts and PostScript drivers and tools, as well as most of the technical appendices of the first edition have been removed from the printed book.

This eliminated material, updated and expanded with information on TrueType, Opentype fonts, and PDF utilities, is now freely available from this site. Note, however, that since at present the TeX community is very active with developing new tools to optimally handle OpenType, Unicode and PDF, the text is in constant flux and will be updated as new developments, such a XeTeX and luatex, mature and stabilize. Moreover, comments and suggestions for improving the material are very much welcome and will be included in future revisions.

Chapters 10 and 11 of the first edition of the LaTeX Graphics Companion (PostScript fonts and beyond and PostScript and PDF tools) have been updated and extended and are available here (5.5 Mbytes). The source of the examples in these chapters (which are called chapters 21 and 22 to limit confusion with the chapter numbers in the First edition) is available as a zip file here (160 kbytes). See below for an explanation of how to run these examples.

Another document The XeTeX Companion: TeX meets Opentype and Unicode, is still very much work in progress. It describes how the XeTeX engine, an extension of e-TeX, whose basic encoding is Unicode, lets one use Opentype fonts in (La)TeX documents in an transparent and easy way. It is available here (3.0 Mbytes).

The source of the examples in the chapters of this document is available as a zip file here (56 kbytes). For many examples you will need at least fontconfig version 2.4.

Running the examples

To be able to run the examples you should have a recent version of a TeX distribution (e.g., the latest version of TeXLive). Moreover the examples come in various flavours.

To find out more about the second edition of the LaTeX Graphics Companion or more generally about LaTeX-related books have a look at this web page.


Last Mod. 9 January 2011 (Michel Goossens).