[wplug] OT again: LaTeX primers

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 04:54 -0400, Hagbard Celine wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> Following an Eric Cooper suggestion, I downloaded teTeX, built it, and even
> played with it a bit.  Looks like this may work!  Yay!
> 
> One thing I wonder, though.  Can someone (Eric, maybe), point me to some
> introductory and/or reference texts to TeX/LaTeX?  I might as well learn *how*
> to use it... :o)
> 
> Thanks again,
> HC

If you're looking for just a brief introduction try:

"The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e"
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/

It's available in way too many languages and generally tells what you
need to know to get going with LaTeX.  It's what I used to learn the
language five or six years ago.

The Indian Tex Users Group also put out a nice little primer that tells
you how to do more eyecandy type stuff at:

http://sarovar.org/projects/ltxprimer/


The TeX users group has a good selection of other helpful resources at:

http://www.tug.org/begin.html

Hope this helps.  It takes a while to get out of the mindset of Word,
where you have to position everything yourself.  It's all about letting
go and just trusting that TeX will do it right (at least most of the
time).

--Patrick

PS.  One thing I'm surprised that many people miss is pdflatex.  In most
cases just substitute pdflatex for latex on the command line and you'll
get a nice looking PDF, instead of having to go through dvi->ps->pdf and
then seeing it create horrible looking fonts in Acrobat reader.