On Fri, Apr 10, 1998 at 02:15:34PM +1100, Damon Muller wrote: > On this topic, sort of... > > I'm going to be writing a Masters thesis this year (ie. approx 30k words), > and I'm planning on doing it in Linux (drag myself kicking and screaming > into the Emacs documentation...). > > The possibilities I am looking as as to format are the ubiquitous LaTeX, or > the newer contender, SGML. I don't know any of either, so I'm going to have > to learn something from scratch, but I'm wondering if anyone has any > recomendations as to which is easier to learn and use. I do know a little > HTML. > > I know that SGML can be converted to LaTex and lots of other stuff, LaTex > to HTML, RTF all that stuff, so either would prolly be alright. > > Any comments? Anyone recomend a good starting point to learn one? > > Thanks, > > damon > > > ======== > Damon Muller (damon@lenore.empire.net.au) > Web Page: www.sub.net.au/~tr It's not a sense of humor. It's > ICQ UIN: 2920281 a sense of irony disguised as one. > PGP Key ID: 0x232C09E1 - Bruce Sterling > > If you have to done lot of math typesetting, may be latex is better than SGML. The learning curves is a little steep but if you use lyx (for wisywig like interface) or a (X)Emacs with AUC-TeX (for a better control), you can quickly learn. There are lot of documentation about LaTeX available. Check for your local mirror of CTAN. ["http://www.CTAN.ORG/";]. I recommend personnaly "LaTeX Essentials" [http://www.CTAN.ORG/CTAN/tex-archive/info/latex-essential/index.html";]. Also, some good books are "LaTeX, A Documentation Preparation System" from Leslie Lamport (ISBN 0-201-52983-1, Addison-Wesley) and "The LaTeX companion" from Goosen. Mittelbach and Samarin (ISBN 0-201-54199-8, Addison-Wesley). If you don't have to typeset mathematics, may be you will prefer SGML. Take then a look at the debiandoc package, where an excellent introduction is provided. Check out however that SGML is not a "word processor" like TeX... You do the content and it decided the format. It can be harder to have exactly the format you want at output. (BTW, LaTeX too, but it's more easy to change latex behaviour than SGML, IMHO!!!) -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fabien Ninoles Running Debian/GNU Linux E-mail: fab@tzone.org WebPage: http://www.callisto.si.usherb.ca/~94246757 WorkStation [available when connected!]: http://nightbird.tzone.org/ RSA PGP KEY [E3723845]: 1C C1 4F A6 EE E5 4D 99 4F 80 2D 2D 1F 85 C1 70 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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