LaTeX cookbook?

Question

Has anyone written, or is anyone working on, a LaTeX cookbook? Specifically, a guide to writing intermediate/advanced LaTeX macros and solutions to other common tasks?

I found a handful of resources on the Web, but these were all brief and basic and appeared to be written for beginners. I also found a document called "Advanced LaTeX", which looks good, but is only 23 pages, and is actually only intermediate rather than advanced.

I would love to have on my shelf a thick book that covers hundreds of short practical topics, with lots of visual examples.

Things I have wondered how to do—and eventually learned thanks to folks here who have kindly answered my questions—include:

Symbols

• Using \ooalign to stack glyphs for finely-tuned custom symbols.
• Creating custom symbols with TikZ when a symbol can't easily be created by mixing existing symbols.
• Extracting a single glyph from a font without loading the font to use in a macro.
• Patching \verbatim* and \verb* to override a symbol.

Styles

• Testing whether the current style is slant or italic.
• Using \mathchoice to ensure a macro displays properly in various math contexts.

General

• Using \makeatletter and \makeatother for internal sub-macros.
• Detecting an optional argument inside a macro.
• Extracting specific characters from a macro argument string.
• Using \futurelet to query the next token.
• Using \ifthenelse to select different behaviors within a macro (I didn't even know about the ifthen package until yesterday, and I wish I'd known about it weeks ago).
• Using \fbox to debug heights, depths, and width issues.

Formatting

• Custom vertical and horizontal spacing in the tabular environment.
• When and how to use \parbox.
• Subtle differences between \hbox and \mbox.

Words

• Right and wrong ways to suppress ligatures within a tricky word (such as "shelfful" or "cufflinks").

Many of these things turned out to be easy, but some (like \mathchoice, \ooalign, and \futurelet) were difficult if not overwhelming at first attempt. Most common questions seem to have answers here on TeX.sx already, but the answers can be elusive when the magic word or phrase to search for is not known, or when the possibility itself is not known (I totally didn't know about TikZ/PGF, for example).

Answer 1

There's a LaTex wikibook which attempts to be something like what you describe. I've found it very useful in the time it's been around, and recommend it highly.

FWIW, I'm not connected to the project in any way, just a happy reader.

Answer 2

Yes, there is a 378 page book titled "LaTeX Cookbook" published by PACKT Publishing (2015) written by Stefan Kottwitz. I downloaded the free sample ebook edition, and based on the table of contents, it looks like an excellent resource.

Answer 3

Tim Arnold tried to get one kind of cookbook to go but it never took off. Too bad.