LaTeX Isn't Just for Technical Documents

LaTeX is not just for peer-reviewed math journals. You can use LaTeX to make PDFs that rival those made with expensive software, like the Adobe line of products. You have to get the basics down first, but then it’s just a matter of picking and using good fonts, colors, and layouts.

So here is one of my examples to prove this point. It’s a quick reference sheet for cooking. Although the content isn’t actually my own, the formatting and layout are. In a reddit post on the LaTeX sub-reddit, user a_contact_juggler challenged the sub-reddit to make a LaTeX version of user Fredthecoolfish’s single-sided, handwritten cooking cheat sheet. The original handwritten cheat sheet is available here.

You can see other people’s LaTeX versions in this reddit post. My version is below. Click on it to download the PDF.

Cooking cheat sheet

And here are the raw files:

• LaTeX file
• Reddit logo image file

There isn’t much education in this post. The main point is to show that it’s possible to make colorful, attractive PDFs for a general audience—not just engineers and math enthusiasts—with LaTeX.

Although the main point here isn’t to describe new functions in LaTeX, I did make an interesting discovery while working on this: it’s possible to turn images into links with the standard \href command. For example, enter the following in a LaTeX document:

\href{URL}{%
  \includegraphics[height=18pt,keepaspectratio]%
  {IMAGE_FILENAME}%
}

Replace URL with the URL you want to link to, and replace IMAGE_FILENAME with file name of the image.