On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 22:25 -0600, Justin R Findlay wrote:
> LaTeX is awesome if you're not going to be diverging from the builtin
> document layout styles too much. If you are then you're likely going to
> be editing raw TeX to get things done,
I don't agree. "The LaTeX Companion"[1] documents hundreds of packages
that extend the basic capabilities of LaTeX, and none of these packages
require that you do anything in raw TeX. ("The LaTeX Companion" is over
1000 pages, but Leslie Lamport's original LaTeX documentation[2] is 272
pages. LaTeX has been used many times to typeset books.)
> and unfortunately though TeX is very clean and very good at what it does
> it's not a language that's easy to understand.
Yes, it is true that LaTeX + packages require a significant investment
of time to learn. TeX is, after all, a language for typesetting, and as
a language, it is extensible, witness LaTeX and the LaTeX packages.
(METAFONT is a sister language for designing typefaces.) But the reward
for learning TeX and friends is beautiful books, especially if you're
doing mathematics.
If you don't want to deal with hundreds of packages just to typeset a
book, check out Peter Wilson's very capable memoir package[4] for
LaTeX.
--- Vladimir
P.S. You'd be set to go if you got "The LaTeX Companion" and the "Guide
to LaTeX"[3].
[1] "The LaTeX Companion", 2/e, F. Mittelbach & M. Goossens,
http://tinyurl.com/g2tnr
[2] "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System". L. Lamport,
http://tinyurl.com/m6dk4
[3] "Guide to LaTeX", 4/e, H. Kopka & P. Daly, http://tinyurl.com/kc7m4
[4] memoir: a LaTeX package to typeset fiction, non-fiction and
mathematical books, P. Wilson, http://tinyurl.com/qlm4o
--
Vladimir G. Ivanovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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