>> the Te?book may be authoratative, but it's by no means short. > > You can get started with the very first chapters. And once you stumble > upon something more special, you pick up the book. > > 300 pages without the appendices, and with exercices it's short; and > exhaustive. Compare with books about "LaTeX".
i'm going to call this the "latin is easy" theory. cantonese and arabic are much harder to learn. ☺ > But most of the "difficulties" with TeX come precisely because this is > not "plain" TeX: plain TeX (i.e. the macros from D.E. Knuth) just work > too. But TeX is hidden---see the comments I received at first: "why do > you want to make a TeX package? People only use LaTeX..." most of the difficulties of teχ are because it's a macro language. macros don't scale. dek did a wonderful job, but you just can't paper over the fact that all this wierd macro expansion is going on. - erik
