Using LaTeX (was: Re: Writing technical text - THANKS !)
Hi, John and others.
On Nov 15 2005, John M. Gabriele wrote:
> One thing I don't understand about LaTeX/TeX though is why it's so
> darn big and complicated.
LaTeX isn't big. Well, it does have some core packages, but they surely
aren't *that* many.
The "complicated" part is probably using "external" packages. For each
one of these, you indeed have to read its documentation.
> Sure it's easy to use (as long as you don't want to do anything out of
> the ordinary), but I've never been able to understand how all the
> parts fit together.
I would say that many people learn LaTeX the wrong way: getting a poorly
designed document and just changing it quickly until it contains more or
less what the person wants it to have.
This is wrong in, at least, two aspects:
1 - this is not in line with the philosophy of LaTeX of separation of
content and presentation (which was here for a loooong time before
people in the Web decided to use Cascading Style Sheets with their
pages and all the technology that accompanies XML);
2 - as an extension of point 1, I'd say that writers should learn at
least a modicum of how to use LaTeX macro, so that they create new
environments for their necessities instead of hardcoding things.
See, if you have a good macro, you can even put that in a style file
of your own and forget about formatting something in that way in the
future. In this sense, you can regard your style file as a "library"
(in the computer programming sense) of distilled knowledge.
And this also implies that a good approach to using LaTeX is to
regard the text as "the source code" of your text and even use tools
like control revision systems (e.g., RCS, CVS, Subversion etc).
> "apt-get install" is great here, since installing from source has got
> to be a nightmare.
Don't forget to install tetex-doc and use the "TeX Catalogue on-line"
for looking for packages to accomplish what you want. Also, a *very*
good source of information here is the UK TeX FAQ (search in Google).
Not only it is very good, but it is quite entertaining.
Hope this helps, Rogério Brito.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/
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