The Periodic Table of the Elements

The periodic table is a huge chart that organizes all known chemical elements by their atomic number and other properties. It makes it easy to see their relationships by grouping similar ones together.

This table is essential for chemists and students as it’s a visual tool for classifying elements into groups and periods. It helps in quickly identifying metals, nonmetals, and metalloids and understanding trends like electronegativity, atomic radius, and ionization energy across and down the table.

With LaTeX and the pgf-PeriodicTable package written by Hugo Gomes, you can easily print the periodic table in seven languages with a variety of coloring and other options.

Here’s the fastest and easiest way without any customization:

\documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}
\usepackage{pgf-PeriodicTable}
\begin{document}
\pgfPT
\end{document}

And that’s what we get – a huge chart, just zoom in:

$Periodic table of elements$

And here’s a quick example of a customized output, selecting the IUPAC groups 1 and 2 (Lithium group and Beryllium group), periods 2 and 3, with custom colors:

\documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}
\usepackage{pgf-PeriodicTable}
\usepgfPTlibrary{colorschemes}
\pgfPTGroupColors{example}{G1=red!90!black,G2=orange}
\begin{document}
\pgfPT[show title=false, back color scheme=example,
  legend box={draw=blue!50,fill=blue!20},
  show extra legend,
  Z list={1,3,4,11,12}]
\end{document}

This gives us that small chart:

$Lithium group and Beryllium group$

Read more in Chapter 11, Using LaTeX in Science and Technology, available as free sample chapter.