Re: TECH: more help?

On 6/22/06, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> Ooooh, that would be loverly, but... From everything I've heard about LaTex
> (on this list some years back, Christophe Grandsire was an enthusiast) it
> sounds too complex and too quirky-- not a trick this old dog needs to try to
> learn at this point.
Whatever happened to Christophe, anyway?

>(And, isn't it expensive?)
Nope.  LaTeX is free of charge.  Like that other popular L*X word, it
comes in a variety of implementations;  for a Windows PC I've found
the MikTeX package to be easiest to install and get going with; it's
available here: http://www.miktex.org/

It is somewhat "complex", in that there are many moving parts,
especially compared to a monolithic word processor like Word or
OOWriter.  However, you don't have to learn very much to get going.
Creating a LaTeX document is basically a three-step process:

1. Type the document up in a plain text editor, using the
\macro{arguments} syntax for the mandatory prelude stuff (e.g.
\documentstyle{article}), and whenever you want to do fancy stuff.
Save the document in a file with a .tex extension.

2. Run the "latex" command on the .tex file.  If you've made errors
and LaTeX can't figure out what you mean, it will complain and abort.
Otherwise, you get a "dvi" file containing the output.  This is a
"DeVice Independent" rendering of the document that can readily be
formatted for various printers and display schemes without having to
go through all the parsing of the original LaTeX file.

3. Run a converter to get the final output.  Usually you want PDF,
which you create by running the "dvipdf" command on the dvi file.

Then open up the PDF in your favorite PDF viewer (e.g. Adobe Acrobat)
and see how it looks.  If you like it, great.  If not, go back to step
1 and repeat.

It's a far cry from WYSIWYG, but you can do nifty stuff.

Unfortunately, the default font is, as mentioned, fugly.  And the
default margins are set ludicrously large, too.  So right off the bat
you have to do some extra stuff beyond the bare minimum if you want an
attractive document...

>  Also, this project is a one-time affair, so I fear the effort wouldn't be warranted.
Ah, but once you learn LaTeX, you may reach for it on future projects
as well.  It is quite powerful.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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