Re: Using LaTeX (was: Re: Writing technical text - THANKS !)

[Clive Menzies <clive@clivemenzies.co.uk>]

On (15/11/05 20:49), Rogério Brito wrote:

[snip]
> 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.

Thanks Rogerio

I flirted with LaTex briefly, a while ago, but didn't get very far.
Your advice prompts me to revisit it :)

Regards

Clive

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