As a beginner, I keep running into difficulties when in the need of positioning elements. Pushing them down, up, left or right should be easy concepts, but I find it hard to visualize as a beginner how this should be done, especially when I want to put something relative some some other element.
In any way, this site has been most helpful but I was wondering if there is a recommended tutorial on how to position elements in LaTeX?
Half of my searches direct to the LaTeX wiki and this page, but these do not answer my most common questions, like this or this. I'm specifically looking for documentation with regards to positioning that:
- Starts from scratch (focused at beginners)
- Uses images to illustrate (one image is worth… etc)
- Applies 'best practices' / explains what is the 'right way' and what is not, even though both might work.
I know, this is asking a lot. But I'm just wondering you know of something…
Best Answer
You mention that you're a newcomer to LaTeX. Welcome! It sounds to me that, in order to develop some basic familiarity with LaTeX-based versions of the document building blocks you express interest in, it may be a good idea to start with a solid introductory tutorial into many LaTeX-related matters. Perhaps the best-known such tutorial is Tobi Oetiker et al.'s The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2ε, most recently updated in 2011. [Update Nov. 2020: The document was most recently updated in March 2018.] This document is so well known and so highly regarded that it's been translated into about two dozen languages!
Among the other LaTeX tutorials for beginners that are available online, I can also recommend Nicola Talbot's LaTeX for Complete Novices and Andrew Roberts's Getting to Grips with LaTeX.
The recent books by Marc van Dongen, LaTeX and Friends, Springer, 2012, and Peter Flynn, Formatting Information: An Introduction to Typesetting with LaTeX, Silmaril Consultants, 2011, may also be of interest to you, particularly because they both stress matters of document organization and how to implement them using LaTeX.
Happy LaTeXing!