More Math Into LaTeX

My book Practical LATEX was published last year. Many of the changes in this fifth
edition are based on Practical LATEX and on my articles “What Is New in LATEX?” in
the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Part I. Short Course of the fourth edition was revised under the title Chapter 1.
Short Course. I renamed Part I: Mission Impossible. This part nowhas a second chapter:
And a few more things . . . The new Chapter 1 is what you absolutely, unquestionably
must know to write your first TEX document. It’s only 30 pages long, should not take
more than a few hours to read and understand. No typing is necessary, the files you
need are provided for you, see Section 1.1.2.
The new Chapter 2 adds a few more topics that is helpful to know such as the aux
files, what is their role, how to handle them. It deals in some detail with error messages.
Finally, it contains Brian Davey’s list of LATEX mistakes most often made by authors.
To create “vector graphics” illustrations (see page 343 for an example), many users
switched to Till Tantau’s TikZ package. We introduce TikZ in Chapter 13. We hope
that the few commands we discuss are sufficient to get you started.
I carefully revised all the material in this book. One would think that this is not
necessary in a fifth edition. But as Fred says, there are infinitely many typos in any
book, and even our best efforts remove only finitely many. And so many of the links
have changed. . .
Finally, I should mention that I renamed the awkward user-defined commands to
custom commands. How come I have not thought of this before?