[wplug] OT again: LaTeX primers

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Wed, 3 Aug 2005, 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
>

I'll also toss in my $0.02 .. 0.03, 0.04... make that $0.16:

First, comp.text.tex is a very responsive and knowledgeable newsgroup, 
though they do expect question-askers to do due diligence (in particular, 
construct a minimal example -- which usually exposes the problem without 
posting!)

TeX is slow learning.  Little things like "Type 1 fonts" versus "Type 3 
fonts" messing up PDF documents, or the cryptic error messages produced 
when compilation fails, can be very difficult to adapt to.

But I'm flatly convinced that it's the most powerful document preparation 
system in existence.  I went from zero (last January) to everything in 
about 18 months -- now I use it for posters, slideshows, papers, letters 
...

Others have suggested the "Not so short introduction to LaTeX" -- well, in 
the greatest spirit of open source, once you've learned from the manual, 
read the manual's TeX source!  I found it here:

http://www.arcetri.astro.it/CC/guides/lshort-english/src/

IMHO, LaTeX is easiest to learn by example, and that guide is a real, 
publishable work done all in LaTeX.

If you want to see some really neat stuff, check out the pstricks package:
TeX + postscript provides some amazing graphics capability.  [However, 
using pstricks requires going through postscript before creating a pdf, 
since pdflatex doesn't understand the specialized postscript commands.]

http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi/

-Brandon