Re: Language Creation: The International Language Construction Bulletin (working title :)) )

On 3 May 02, at 10:41, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> I don't have Perl, and it's one of the rare things I'm not so keen on
> installing on my Windows ME computer. How big is a Perl installation on
> Windows? If it's a tiny thing that doesn't create programs running on the
> background, I may consider take it...
I have the ActivePerl distribution (which is a pre-packaged binary
distribution for Windows); D:\Perl is 36 MB, but 12 MB of that is
D:\Perl\site (i.e. things I installed myself and not in the base
package) -- so I would guess the ActivePerl distribution will be
somewhere between 20 and 24 MB. And no things running in the
background; it's just an interpreter which you start explicitly on a
script you want to run. If you want it, it's under
http://www.ActiveState.com/ somewhere (look for "ActivePerl"), or ask
in private email.

> > you wouldn't mind summarising a basic set of commands, then I
> > could try to submit bits of LaTeX.
>
> No problem! It's actually very easy.
That's what I imagined. I'll just try it out, then, if I can think of
something to write about ;)

> > * image (either a real LaTeX image insertion string or a dummy that
> > you
> > will replace with the real thing -- for when you want to put an image
> > in the middle of your text)
>
> To include images is a bit more complicated. I you don't want to worry about
> it, just send the image separately and write in the position of the text where
> you want it: Here I want an image :)) (add % in front to make it a comment).
OK -- the second solution seemed to be what I had in mind ;)

> > Tables, I can imagine, may be too difficult in LaTeX to describe
> > easily to someone who hasn't done it before. But maybe they're
> > not?
>
> Well, the environment "tabular" which is used to make tables is not
> easy, but very powerful. If you're interested, I'll give you an
> explanation in private. It would be too long and boring for the whole
> list.
OK, sure. Send me private email about it and I'll decide whether I can
handle it.

> Of course, if you want to see what the thing looks like, you have to
> get a distribution of LaTeX, and learn about the heading (the first
> lines of a TeX file, which state which kind of document you're
> writing and what packages you use). If you're interested (it's easy
> to understand, if a bit boring :)) ), I'll mail you off-list about
> it.
OK. I had downloaded some kind of TeX distribution onto my computer at
work (the "standard Win32" one -- is that mikTeX or emTex? I think one
of the two) but never used it since at a quick glance I couldn't figure
out what you had to do to produce any text ;) If you want to try to
give me an introduction by private email, that would be welcome.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>