Le 02/01/2011 21:18, Philipp Stephani a écrit :
Am 02.01.2011 um 19:38 schrieb [email protected]:
Hello,
If I want to be a high level user/wizard/professional of TeX, I can buy the
TeXbook and learn everything in it and experiment a lot. Here is a very
interesting but heavy work to do.
If I want to be a high level user of PDFTeX, I'll have to be a wizard of TeX
and a professional of eTeX : Very heavy work
If I want to be a high level user of LuaTeX, I'll have to be a wizard of
PDFTeX, Lua, Omega, Aleph,... : Very very heavy work.
So if I want to be a high level user of LuaTeX, I have to learn everything
about the thirty years old TeX history.
When LuaTeX will stable enough (LuaTeX v2.0 ???), is it on the roadmap to write a
"LuaTeXbook" just
like D.E. Knuth did in 1983 ? The idea would be to explain completely the
functionalities of LuaTeX as if nothing had never existed before, it would be
the opportunity to
give users a new start in the world of TeX who allows to understand this
programming langage (LuaTeX, not TeX) without having to look for all pieces of
the puzzle.
Of course, this "LuaTeXbook" would deal with Lua (and why not lua libraries,
fontforge...) but we must bear in mind that the TeX aspect matters most.
This book would be a very heavy project but it would be a very useful tool.
Such an project would indeed be desirable, but, as you already said, it would
be lots of work. For now, I think you can get very far with a bit less heavy
work:
1. TeX: The TeXbook was written for users of plain TeX, or for those that want
to understand every detail. For TeX programming knowledge, TeX by Topic is more
than sufficient, and very well and succinctly written. Even in this book, you
don't have to read every detail; for starting, the chapters 1–4, 6–8, 10–13,
32, 33, 36 should suffice.
2. eTeX: The manual is not that long, and many sections can be skipped. I think
the most important sections are 3.3, 3.5, 3.7, 3.12, 5.
3. pdfTeX: Again, most parts of the manual are not totally relevant for
programming. Sections 7.3, 7.4, 7.15, 7.16, 7.21 seem to be the most important
at first sight.
4. Lua: Lots of good material is available, most notably Roberto
Ierusalimschy's book Programming in Lua and the Lua reference.
5. XeTeX: should not be required, but the unofficial reference is sometimes a
bit more detailed than the LuaTeX manual.
6. After that, you should be able to read the LuaTeX manual without problems.
Hello Philipp, thanks for answering.
-The program you propose is maybe a good way to learn deeply LuaTeX but
you found this program because you have already read all the stuff about
TeX and successors but what about newcommers ? They don't know what to
read and they don't know what to read first. Moreover, the program you
propose is rather personnal (you can read this, you can skip that) and
it is not sure that it would be convenient for anyone.
-Nothing about Aleph ?
