Want to start with latex
 

Hi,

I wanted to start on latex. I have installed the texlive-base package coz the full texlive package is some 350 Mb.
That doesnt include much documentation i believe.

Now since I have tried many word processor programs, I am stuck to my new found love for emacs. I would like to use emacs for my document preparation. I am led to believe that emacs together with latex make a great document prep system.

I would like my documents to be PDFs so that i can easily share with my associates. Most people who will be reading my docs are on windows and not exactly computer geeks and not appreciative of plain ASCII files.

This latex system seems promising but a bit daunting as I cant find much material for beginners.
I would like some help so that I can learn latex and emacs.

Thank you.

This is a good tutorial.

In google, search for "The Not so Short Introduction to Latex". It is a e-book that is an excellent guide for learning Latex.

Plenty of them at http://www.latex-project.org/guides/.

You could try this:

http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/

And commonly comes with the TeTex package, for instance.

locate lshort.pdf



Cheers,
Tink

lshort.pdf is a great intro for beginners. Thank you for that.

I am dealing with a lot of people on windows machines. Could you please tell me what file format you use for sharing documents weth such ppl?
There is still time for open formats to gain ground. by the way I find people sticking to Win xp rather than go for vista. I feel that may cause a further delay.

I would like to be a master in an independent format. What format for me would you suggest?

I generally create pdfs (using LaTeX), and people seem perfectly happy with that. Otherwise, as I understand it, rtf is a well known, fairly well documented (pardon the pun) and easy to edit (even when opened in a simple text editor) format. There's even a utility (LaTeX2rtf, I think it's called - for linux and windows, it seems: http://sourceforge.net/projects/latex2rtf/) that will take a .tex file and generate a correspondingly formatted .rtf file, which is quite handy.

If all else fails, what's wrong with ASCII? ;)

I'm convinced that the people who created latex were taking hard drugs :)
Especially the one who wrote texmf.cnf containing these nice "memory limits" and "pool_size" and such...

But latex makes the most beautiful documents I've seen. I give them to windoze users as pdf, using all security protection (forbid to print, select,..) . niark niark niark.

I have used lyx, and it seems a nice way to get started with latex. It is a graphical front-end, but allows you to enter tex commands from the keyboard if you know them, allowing you to wean yourself off the graphical aspects over time.

I have also heard that texmacs is nice, in that it allows you to access symbolic algebra and computational software from within a document and include the output, like Mathematica, for instance.

I know that lyx is available for windows users, and I would guess that is also the case for texmacs, as the gnu people normally make packages available to most popular OSs.

Curious ... I never thought of doing that - what tool
do you use to lock PDFs down like this in the conversion
process from LaTeX to PDF?



Cheers,
Tink

It's with pdftk, we do this as the last pass of the generation (which is a makefile actually), converting an "open" pdf to a "closed" one.
Pdftk can modify some nice stuffs within pdfs.

Yes it can indeed. I've only ever used it to explode PDFs :}



Cheers,
Tink

Well seems I was right about the PDF format after all.
I was always after a text editor editable format. With the success i got from making beautiful webpages with HTML, I was seriously looking for a markup geared towards printable ( hard copy) output. Seems I have hit the bull's eye with LaTeX.

I was afraid that people would think that I was talking dirty when I would tell that I use 'latex' for my docs.
Its kind of a relief now that i know it is pronounced late'ch'. and that that X is actually 'chi'. ;)

Yes, lateχ is much less funny than latex..
ooopps