Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
> Steve Litt wrote:
>
>> How do you know about all these packages? This is true for many on the list
>> -- someone comes up with a need and you know exactly what package to use to
>> accomplish it. Do you have all this memorized, or do you have a quick way of
>> looking it up? Either way, how do you do it -- I want to do it too.
>>
> Several reasons. I use many of the packages (like enumitem) myself. I've
> published quite a few books recently, and faced many of those questions there
> myself. And I frequently follow the discussion on comp.text.tex and (German)
> de.comp.text.tex (which both are good newsgroups, and googling their archives
> often helps).
>
> Finally, another excellent resource is Robin Fairbairn's TUG FAQ:
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yes
>
A few more resources, besides the ones J"urgen mentioned:
* The /LaTeX Companion/ both lists and documents many commonly used
packages, including pretty much all of those that ship with
standard distributions. I couldn't get along without it.
* TeX distributions ship with a ton of documentation. Finding your
way around it can be the tricky part. My distribution, tetex,
ships with an index of all available documentation, at
/usr/share/texmf/doc/helpindex.html.
* The TeX Catalogue, at
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html, is
extremely comprehensive, and the topical index is incredibly
helpful. (I should use it more.)
* Subscribe to the CTAN announcements RSS feed, at
http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.ctan.announce, and keep
up-to-date with what packages are being added and updated. If you
don't use RSS (and if not, why on earth not?), you can just read
the blog at http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.ctan.announce.
Cheers,
Richard
--
==================================================================
Richard G Heck, Jr
Professor of Philosophy
Brown University
http://bobjweil.com/heck/
==================================================================
Get my public key from http://sks.keyserver.penguin.de
Hash: 0x1DE91F1E66FFBDEC
Learn how to sign your email using Thunderbird and GnuPG at:
http://dudu.dyn.2-h.org/nist/gpg-enigmail-howto
