[PLUG] Re: learning TEX/LaTEX

[Kevin Falcone <kevinfal@seas.upenn.edu>]

>>>>> "KB" == Kevin Brosius <kbrosius@kns.com> writes:

  KB> 'The TeXbook' by Donald E. Knuth, 

This comes highly recommended if you want to write in TeX instead of
LaTeX or if you just want to understand how LaTeX is but together.  I
tend to use mostly TeX.

  KB> and "The LaTeX Users Guide' or something similar.  

Well, there is Leslie Lamport's book, and even though Leslie created
the original macros for LaTex, I hate that book, and have had trouble
using it in the past.  I own "A Guide to LaTeX2e" by Kopka/Daly.
Kopka has also published a straight "A Guide to LaTeX" book, I
believe.  Most linux distributions come with the newer 2e version.

  KB> The only downside I can think of is the lack of WYSIWYG editing.

Well, there is lyx

  KB> If you've got a printer to do a lot of output testing, or aren't
  KB> very picky about output appearance then you'll do fine.  Of
  KB> course, you may be able to preview on Linux/Unix much easier now
  KB> than I could back then.

xdvi or gv once you run the dvi file through dvips

Emacs has a mode such that C-c C-c will invoke (la)tex on the file
if there have been modifications, and the second time you "compile" it
will start xdvi.  xdvi automagically picks up on changes in the .dvi
file once you re-run (la)tex.  This makes writing things relatively
easy.  In fact, the time sheets for my summer consulting were produced
with tex and mailed as PDFs.

-kevin

-- 
Q: How about developing <some unlikely and ultimately pointless driver>?
A: It exists. This is Linux. Anything that silly has already been done.
    -- Alan Cox, linux-kernel mailing-list, 19980911


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