all Recently I came across the document http://sarovar.org/download.php/120/ltxprimer-1.0.pdf a very good introduction to LaTeX. After reading it, started writing, first a simple letter to my friend, a paragraph from news paper, ... and a part of chapter in Plus I mathematics (of course with frequent reference to ltxprimer-1.0.pdf). Took the whole day (sunday), but worth it.
Highly useful for writing technical and non-technical documents and included in almost all GNU/Linux distributions. It does not require high end systems. In fact I used a Pentium 100Mhz 32 mb RAM to do all the above jobs. For typesetting in malayalam http://sarovar.org/download.php/16/malayalam-0.8.tar.gz Download ->Unpack->install (as mentioned in the document of the package). Within a couple of hours (with the help of http://sarovar.org/download.php/32/mm-usr.pdf, included in the malayalam-0.8.tar.gz package) made a sample (almost half of a a4 size paper) page, in malayalam. I feel, if one practice the key strokes daily for a couple of months, typing letters/articles/books etc in malayalam is as easy as writing them in english. More information other posibilities of LaTeX at http://www.river-valley.com/ http://www.tug.org.in/ Of course the WYSWYG feature not directly available. We can overcome this by using whizzytex-mode of xemacs. A resonably good solution. with regards M.Balakrishna Pillai
