To change the paper to A3 in our document and in landscape orientation we would use the following:

\documentclass[12pt,landscape]{article}
\usepackage[a3paper]{geometry}
\begin{document}
...
\end{document}

The use of nodes and the current.page label in conjunction with some other parameters attached to the tikz drawing will allow us to achieve the absolute positioning on the page.

As an example consider a one page drawing where we want to put a text box in the centre of the page.

\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
\draw (current page.center) node {Add Text};
\end{tikzpicture}

If we wanted to add elements to the edge of a page we could use the current page.north west anchor to locate in the top left of the page.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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When creating a tikz picture the origin is assumed to be at (0,0) and objects are placed with positioning relative to the origin on the picture. If we wanted to add a grid with lines from -3 to +3 in both the horizontal and vertical axes then we would use the \draw command combined with grid.

\draw (-3,-3) grid (3,3);

We can use the draw options to change how the grid is displayed. To make the grid lines thin we could add very thin and change the colour to a light gray (black!20):

\draw[very thin,black!20] (-3,-3) grid (3,3);

To add a node with text we use a combination of \draw and node, For example to put the node with a single letter A at (1,1):

\draw (1,1) node {A};

We can put an outline around the text in a node by specifying a shape and the draw option (which refers to the colour of the outline of the shape).

\node[shape=rectangle,draw=black] at (0,2) {B};

The fill option is for the inside of the shape. A circle with outline and filled background could be drawn with the following code:

\node[shape=circle,draw=blue,fill=blue!50] at (2,2) {D};

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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As with all LaTeX documents we need to select a document class and include some preamble material prior to the body of our document. A blank template for a document with a single tikz picture is shown here:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{tikzpicture}
...
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The tikz picture has a coordinate system similar to that which you would expect where moving from left to right on the page corresponds to increasing the x value and bottom to top increases the y value. A line can be drawn between two points wit the \draw command:

\draw (0,0) -- (1,0);

To draw a line between multiple points these can be chained together in a single draw command:

\draw (0,0) -- (1,0) -- (1, 4);

The line style can be altered by adding various options in square brackets directly after the draw command. So to change to a dashed red line we would write the following code:

\draw[red,dashed] (0,0) -- (2,0);

A circle of a given radius can be draw using the \draw command and we specify the radius of the circle in round brackets:

\draw (0,0) circle (2.5cm);

This will draw a circle with radius of 2.5 cm. The circle could be changed into an ellipse and we would then need to specify the radius in two directions, an example of this:

\draw (0,0) ellipse (2cm and 3.5cm);

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

One idea for enhancing scatter plots covered in Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence is the use of images in place of traditional symbols to provide additional information about that point. To illustrate this idea I have taken the batting data from the recent test series between England and India played in England 2011. The graph is a display of the number of runs scored and number of balls faced with an English or Indian flag indicating the team of the player involved. The graph can be seen here and this has an advantage over the usual scatter plot as there is no need for a legend to accompany the graph.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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When creating tables there is a tabular environment that can be used and we need to specify the number of columns using characters to indicate the text alignment in each column. A simple three column table where all columns are centred would be produced like this:

\begin{tabular}{ccc}
...
\end{tabular}

On individual lines of data the ampersand character is used to indicate different columns. So if we wanted to add a heading to the table we might add the following line within the tabular environment:

Name & Description & Frequency \\

The end of the line is indicated by the \\ and we can move on to the next row of the table on the following line.

We can add vertical lines between the columns by adding information to the column alignment specification. For example to add these vertical lines between all three columns we would write:

\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
...
\end{tabular}

Horizontal lines to cover the whole row can be added at the end of each line to get LaTeX to draw them underneath the most recent row of the table.

Name & Description & Frequency \\ \hline

This draws a line under the title row of our table.

An example of a complete table is given below using data from the International Monetary Fund for the GDP in 2009 for the top ten nations.

\begin{tabular}{|l|c|} \hline
Country & GDP (USD millions) \\ \hline
United States & 14,119,050 \\
Japan & 5,068,894 \\
People's Republic of China & 4,984,731 \\
Germany & 3,338,675 \\
France & 2,656,378 \\
United Kingdom & 2,178,856 \\
Italy & 2,118,264 \\
Brazil & 1,574,039 \\
Spain & 1,467,889 \\
Canada & 1,336,427 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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Document Class

The document class is a template that specifies the appearance of different components of a document, e.g. the font and size of headings. The most commonly used classes are article, which corresponds to a typical layout for a journal article, report or book for longer documents and letter.

\documentclass{article}

When selecting a document class it is also possible to provide some options, including the size of the font – 10pt, 11pt or 12pt. We could also use the twocolumns option to had two columns of text.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

The paper size can also be stated in the options – a4paper etc.

Page Style

There are some basic page styles available in the main document classes. These include plain which has the page number in the footer only or empty where there is nothing in the header or footer.

\pagestyle{empty}

These can be changed during a document, e.g. there might be one page that has a picture but you don’t want the page number to be shown as it might obscur some other useful information.

Page Numbering

The default option is arabic numerals, but we could also use (upper or lower case) Roman numerals in the front part of the document before reverting to using the Arabic numerals.

\pagenumbering{Roman}

Parts of a Document

A document can be divided into various pieces, known as chapters, sections, subsections and so on. To do this in LaTeX we use the commands \chapter, \section and \subsection with the name of the section in curly brackets.

\section{A Section Heading}

Chapters appear in books and reports but not in the article class, while the letter class is a lot simpler than these other classes. In an article the numbering for sections is 1, 2, 3 and so on and the subsections are 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and onwards.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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In a LaTeX document we need to specify a class, which is a file that defines the formatting styles applied to a document. The standard classes available include article, book, letter and custom classes can be defined to create different visual styles for a LaTeX document.

At the top of the document we use the \documentclass command to specify the class to use for the document. For an article we would have:

\documentclass{article}

The preamble after this command and before the main body of the document can be used to include other packages, define environments or various other actions. The body of the document is included within these commands:

\begin{document}
...
\end{document}

It is straightforward to include title information in the document by specifying an author, title and date then followed by a \maketitle command. Note that note all of these are compulsory for a document. A simple example of creating a title:

\title{Using R}
\author{An R Fanatic}
\maketitle

We write the text of our LaTeX document as we would a basic text document and then add commands where we want to make changes to the appearance of text. For example we might want to emphasise some of the text using the \emph:

The \emph{assumptions} underlying the choice of model need to be investigated.

There are a few special symbols worth being aware of when creating LaTeX documents:

• Percentages need to be specified as \%, otherwise they will be confused as meaning a comment so will be ignored.
• Curly brackets are special characters so you need to write \{ and \} if you want to use them in the text.
• Hash (#), dollar ($) and ampersand (&) are all also special characters.

To align a block of text the center, flushright and flushleft environments can be used. Examples of using these:

\begin{center}
Text is centred.
\end{center}
 
\begin{flushright}
Text is flush right.
\end{flushright}
 
\begin{flushleft}
Text is flush left.
\end{flushleft}

The size of the font can be changed using various declarations, which include \small, \normalsize, \large, \Large and \LARGE.

Useful software for working with LaTeX includes:

• MikTeX.
• Texmaker.
• Texniccenter.
• The Indian TeX Users Group.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page. A google search will also through up a large number of good online resources for LaTeX.

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To use this transitions pdflatex needs to be used to create the document as a pdf file and the presentation needs to be viewed in full screen mode to observe the transitions. Adding a transition on a slide is as simple as adding a command like:

\transdissolve

to the slide. This transition disolves the contents of the slide. The LaTeX beamer user guide has further information about the transitions that are available.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.