Printed Manuals

This page contains a list of the various software manuals that I have made up into books and had printed for my own use at lulu.com. If you want hardcopy too, you might find this a convenient way to get them.

Incidentally, if there's a manual you'd like me to do for you rather than doing it yourself, get in touch. (It has to be something I'd like a copy of too, as the process involves buying at least one proof copy.)

Beamer and PGF

Till Tantau has done for slide presentations what Leslie Lamport did for TeX. Tantau's beamer package is an astonishingly functional (and astonishingly engineered) LaTeX package for making slides. It comes with (or rather uses) a LaTeX graphics package TikZ/PGF that does almost every thing you can imagine, and then some. The downside is that the manuals add up to well over a thousand pages. A book is so much easier to read than a thousand pages of PDF not at all formatted for the screen, even though one loses the colour.

These manuals are perfect-bound 22cm x 22cm books, about the same format as the LaTeX book - though I have gone for a more readable 11pt as the main body size: there's enough small print in the code. Each book is about 400 pages.

Beamer User Guide is what it says.
PGF User Guide Vol 1 is the main TikZ/PGF manual.
PGF User Guide Vol 2 is the PGF libraries reference.
PGF User Guide Vol 3 is the PGF utilities, base and system layer reference.

Other TeX and LaTeX

The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol Guide is a dangerous distraction for anybody who uses symbols in their work. In easily browsable book form, it's even more dangerous. This is an A4 perfect-bound book of about 160 pages.

Julian Bradfield

Last modified: Thu May 3 16:39:43 BST 2012