Dear Friends,
I find Donald Knuth's original TeX Book to be far more convincing than any
other shortcuts. My reasons is basically the following : apart from the DTP part of
TeX, one can use it as a nice literate programming tool. Within this I would like to
say that one can use TeX to do the following things :
say, one needs to write down the expansion of "pi" upto 100 places of decimal;
instead of copying the whole thing he writes a small program within the text which is
an implementation of the simple continued fraction expansion of "pi" and produces the
required number
say, one is using a list of students to maintain a student information sheet,
where he has to calculate many other parameters like some averages, some conditional
decisions regarding examination allowance or exemption, etc.., and one can easily do
it within the text on writing a small program.
Remember the whole package TeX is actually written in the TeX program itself,
so it IS VERY POWERFUL, if it can solve all your problems regarding font choice,
hyphenation, spacing and all these minute details involved in a typography. Thus, if
one really wants to get the power of TeX, and not just the DTP feature --- the topmost
tip of the iceberg, I would suggest one to go through the "Tex Book" by Donald Knuth
himself. If one wants to design text materials and develop on TeX, one has to go
through "The Meta Font Book" also, written by the same person.
As for compatibility with other platforms, one can get to know the literate
programming language (or should I call it a "scheme") called WEB.
Hope you find this informative and helpful.
Thanking you,
--
Partha Pratim Ghosh
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Post Doctoral Fellow
Topology and Category Theory Research Group
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch 7701
Cape Town
South Africa
Telephone : (0)27-21-6504527
e-mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page : http://www.topos.netfirms.com
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"Mathematics is a game, play it..."
"Algebra : Analysis :: Anatomy : Physiology"
"... only algebra is dull and only topology is boring, it is
their mixture that is interesting..."
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