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After searching for useful latex guides, manuals, tutorial, etc. for months now I've noticed a general lack of description of the relations between different types of markup. I estimate (from my long search) that a vaste majority of (so called) guides and tutorials simply explain what single markup elements do which is rather useles in latex because you almost never need help to use them in you document, but in complicated nested environments (e.g. a table in a header in an include). In the latter case all guides (which are acutally just manuals or lists) fail, because they don't link information (a description of mbox is not sufficient if there's no description of where I can use it and - even more important due to the horrible compile error messages of (pdf)latex raising errors thousands and thousands of signs after the actual cause with completely unrelated message - where not).

Instead of providing the 19838th copy of existing flattened information in the 1245th latex blog, has there been no attempt to provide a guide putting markup in relation? I know that the set of possible packages is endless and such a guide which would have to reference at least some of them would be out of date soon, but so far I don't see how one can learn latex in an efficient - and even more motivating - aim focused way (feel free to edit for the last term :)).

Kalle Richter
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  • sounds like you want a book or tutorial rather than a manual for a specific command, the latex book and the latex companion, or free books such as the not so short introduction (but at this level of generality I suspect your question is a duplicate of any of the existing questions asking for latex guides – David Carlisle May 17 '14 at 11:53
  • No, it should be in the style of a manual (so guide isn't a good word). My idea is just to dive in search "vertical alignment" and I would get boxA, boxB, package myautoalign providing environment myalginenv; boxA can be used in environment with variable X, but not Y, and myalignenv mustn't be used in tabularx - no infos about latex, what or how great it is, just manual information. And I WANT LINKS!! (as they are the only way to express the relation (see title)) :) If this comes in the form of a guide or a book, so be it... – Kalle Richter May 17 '14 at 11:59
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    This sounds to me like you want The LaTeX Companion, which is (although now a bit on the old side) an excellent compendium of lots of packages and how to use them. It's essentially topic based and has tons of examples (which are all part of TeX Live). I would bet that most of us who have a lot of experience using LaTeX own a copy. – Alan Munn May 17 '14 at 13:31
  • These are all great link (thanks...), but not what I'm looking for. Let's choose a usecase based approach: I want to place the source of an image under it, google a solution and find e.g. http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/95029/add-source-to-figure-caption. Where could I check whether I can use this example \colorbox{ \vbox{ {\scriptsize here}}}? – Kalle Richter May 20 '14 at 13:36

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After I wrote LaTeX Beginner's Guide, I too felt that another way learning to use LaTeX would be a good idea. So, I wrote a book with a use-case base approach, and that's it:

LaTeX Cookbook Cover

It's a collection for solutions to common tasks. For each task, there's a specific example which I go through step by step, and later I explain how it works. Then, modifications or further ideas are explained.

Here is some information for you to decide, if you would like to read the whole book:

I am still working on extending the online gallery.

Nice coincident: I wrote one year on the book, now it's being published, and there's one day left to pre-order it with 35% discount (see blog post).

Stefan Kottwitz
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