Re: TECH: more help?

On 26/06/06, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:
> From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 8:24 PM
>
> > Whatever happened to Christophe, anyway?
>
> He has decided to leave after a flame-war as far as I know.
> He hasn't been much around on latex-for-conlangers as well
> recently, so I guess Andreas is right.
He *was* working on a 36 or 48 hour day at one stage... He's a
physicist IIRC, so at least he's qualified! But I suppose he
mustn't've finished it yet.

> > It's a far cry from WYSIWYG, but you can do nifty stuff.
>
> Yes, it can come in handy. Unfortunately, MiKTeX's package
> manager doesn't allow me to download additional macro
> packages and install them offline. It says that any
> directory I choose wouldn't be a proper directory to install
> packages from. It only seems to accept proper full-blown
> CTAN mirrors. Since my own computer hasn't got internet
> access I feel cheated ...
If you can afford it, DANTE  (the German-speaking TeX Users Group,
<http://www.dante.de>) and TUG (US;  <http://www.tug.org/>) and
probably others sell* a DVD or series of CDs containing all of CTAN as
it was in November 2005, as well as proTeXt (a modified version of
MiKTeX), MacTeX (for Macs) and TeXLive (for most OSes including the
Mac and Windows).

* I *assume* DANTE will sell it to you if you're not a member; TUG
certainly does, but I can't access the DANTE website ATM so I can't
check.

> From: "Philip Newton" <philip.newton@...>
> Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 7:38 PM
>
> > I think that was on purpose, on the principle that the
> > maximum number
> > of characters on a line for easy reading shouldn't be more
> > than "x",
>
> x = 60
Actually, x varies depending on the space between lines, the width of
the font, the ratio of height to width, the average length of words in
a line and myriad other factors. But as a rule of thumb, 60 <= x <=
70.

> > and that MS-Word-like 1-inch margins or so make for lines
> > that are
> > "too long" (at typical font sizes).
>
> LaTeX also makes the spaces at the beginning of lines wider
> for some reason IIRC.
Huh? Spaces at the beginnings of lines? Do you mean between lines?
(which strikes me, if anything, as about as small as modern typography
likes), or maybe the paragraph indent? (which I think might be a
national difference; at least, the American stuff I've seen on
typography recommends 2em, but the only Australian-produced thing I've
read recommends 1em, which is about what the British books I have
immediately on hand seem to have).

> As for the Computer Modern fonts, I find at least the Roman
> variants more elegant than good ol' Times New Roman. And
> regarding the wider margins -- there are macros to
> user-define them.
There's even a package that attempts to emulate Word's default style :)

> From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 8:02 PM
...
> > font.  It's quite a pain, really.  I'm surprised no one is
> > distributing an automated  "tell LaTeX about all my system
> > fonts"
> > program.
>
> Sigh, yes. Even after doing the painful job to convert all
> of the four styles of one font (Garamond in this case) so
> that LaTeX can handle it, LaTeX did not recognize it as a
> proper TTF font. It's really a pain.
Apparently I discovered while going round in circles yesterday trying
to install XeTeX with TeXLive instead of teTeX like it's meant to that
XeTeX also has an experimental port for Windows. The port for Linux is
also experimental, but it does work (I've *finally* got TeX to use
Gentium, after ages of trying!).  The problem is of course that your
files become system dependent (XeTeX on Linux is different to XeTeX on
Mac OS X is presumably different to XeTeX on Windows), and that if you
use it you'll be living on the bleeding edge, and could easily cut
yourself/fall off.

--
Tristan.