Re: How hard would this be?(Learning LaTex)
On Sunday 27 June 2004 05:21, cecil wrote:
> Someone told me today at lunch that what with my "wierd obsession",
> as he called it, to perhaps go without a gui(X), I should try "that
> latex thingie". My buddy is a real wordmaster. LOL. I did some
> reading up on it; it's interesting. I never knew that you could do
> all that with no window system. Does anyone here use it on a regular
> basis, and if so, how hard is it to use, setup, print, etc? I'm
> having thoughts of perhaps writing papers this semester in emacs and
> if this thing... Well, let's just say I'm trying to have an open mind
> about things. I'm trying not to summarily dismiss thing just because
> I don't know what they are, or, are not familiar with them.
I recently did this. I was really daunted at first by the idea of
learning latex, but it turns out to be a lot less terrible in fact.
Get the vim-latexsuite package and give yourself a bit of time to play.
There are excellent help resources -- just google or browse around on
ctan.org and tug.org. Look out for the tutorials. Once you have the
basic thing running, you can find the solution to any specific problem
very easily by googling. Someone has always been there before.
The basic document types are dead easy to work with. If, like me, you
find their graphic layouts dead-ugly too, then you have to set up your
own templates. This takes a bit more familiarity, so I recommend
starting with the standard classes and putting up with the layouts that
come out until you feel confident to mess with them.
I have been working with Kile rather than vim+latexsuite. Kile is the
KDE latex environment. But I may revert to the vim option -- kile is
crashes too often for me.
Enjoy.
HTH
--
richard
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