[ProgSoc] Re: LaTeX

[Telford Tendys <telford@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

> Hi, I'm curious about LaTeX/TeX and considering having a hack around at
> one of it's implementations. I really have no knowledge of TeX but having
> a bit of a look around I found teTeX and NTex for unix systems.

I'm using the Debian linux distribution of tetex. It's a lot of files
but if you use a standard distribution package it does everything
for you. RedHat Linux also has one. TeX is hard to get for the MAC for
some reason all the ports are shareware or commercial but it's easy
to get for MSDOS.

> >From what I gather LaTeX is a set of macro's for use in TeX, although I
> have not been able to find 'it' yet. Does it come with standard TeX
> implementations?

It came with tetex... I think it's pretty common.
LaTeX is much easier to use if you want to do something that fits
the standard templates (article, report, book, etc) and those templates
are tolerably flexible when it comes to style of headings and such.
LaTeX is more like content markup while TeX is more like layout
markup.

> What do you create your tex documents in? A text editor?

Yeah, I just use emacs.

> And then what
> 'engine' do you use to create your finished documents and print them.

`make' which calls both `latex' and `dvips'

If you want to do bibliograhy generation automatically,
you need to put `bibtex' into the makefile, unfortunately
bibtex requires that latex is called again and some of the
same auxillary files are read and then rewritten (which upsets make).
I feel that there is a way round this but at the moment I haven't
been bothered making it really perfect, I just touch the source
and call make again (yeah I know it's yucky but it works).

> I guess I'm just after some useful hints on where to get started.

Hmmm, what system do you have access to?
Does anyone use it on ftoomsh, if it works there then that's
probably the best place to use it. Since TFM is TeX, I assume
that one of the progsoc machines has something working.

The three books that are pretty central are:

``The TeXbook'' by Donald Knuth
``LaTeX User's Guide and Reference Manual'' by Leslie Lamport
``The LaTeX Companion'' by Goosens, Mittlebach and Samarin

I went and bought all three (and books in Australia aren't
cheap). I probably use the LaTeX Companion more than the other two.
Searching the Web should give you some samples of documents to
begin with. I can give you copies of my old reports if you like,
they are inspiring documents indeed <grin>

HOPEFULLY TFM SOURCE CODE WILL SOON BE AVAILABLE NUDGE NUDGE
(which would be a really nice gesture for those who's
constitution claims support for free software).

	- Tel

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