Does Anyone Ever Use Latex?

[cfusion2k 0]

Does anyone in this forum have any experience in LaTeX? I would appreciate if anyone can point me to helpful resources. Thanks.

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

Does anyone in this forum have any experience in LaTeX? I would appreciate if anyone can point me to helpful resources. Thanks.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi cfusion,

Try the following sites:

1: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

2: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/software/tex/amslatex.html

 

Hope they help

.:: Cheers ::.

[cfusion2k 0]

Thanks alot. It does help. Time to try out some tags

[jedipi 0]

I did try it for a while.But it is very difficult to use..Thanks for the link, they are helpful

[evought 0]

Does anyone in this forum have any experience in LaTeX? I would appreciate if anyone can point me to helpful resources. Thanks.

1064285602[/snapback]

I have done very large (400+ pages, dozens of figures), complex documents in LaTeX. Especially for documents with multiple indices and a lot of technical content, there is no beating it. It is also one of the only ways to readily have multiple people working on sections of the same document and sanely track changes and produce integrated drafts. DocBook XML with some good stylesheets comes very close now, but getting (or customizing) decent stylesheets is the difficult part.

 

With either DocBook or LaTeX, you can concentrate on what elements of the document mean and worry about styleing them later. It is much better to see immediately that a certain term is a function reference than that it is italicized. Even careful use of styles in something like Word does not give the author or editor that kind of context as readily and mistakes are caught earlier. LaTeX tends to be more compact than DocBook; the DocBook XML markup can be verbose enough that it hides the text itself.

 

The Lamport books, or, as we always referred to them, the Llama books are a good starting point. Also, get yourself some existing LaTeX documents to look at how other poeple format.

 

I have seen techwriters try to do large multi-user technical documents in Word after saying LaTeX is a "interesting toy" and watch them pull their hair out trying to merge styles, generate and update contents and indices, and generally struggle with things that LaTeX does automatically on every merge and checkout.

 

I you want a GUI work environment, look at Lyx, a document processor which uses LaTeX. I find that Lyx makes it tougher to split documents into multiple iles and leaves the source messier than I would like, but for some people, the fact that it is pretty and has toolbars more than makes up for that. Lyx also lets you select how much of the markup you want to see at a particular time which can help while editting. Personally, I use either a version of Emacs with LaTeX macros or JEdit to edit the source. Most good programming editors let you collapse sections of text or hide certain levels of markup.

 

You may also want to consider a dual monitor setup for any serious markup-based document production. I usually write on one screen and switch between reference materials and document previews on the other. It can almost double productivity and many systems are easy to add dual-screen support. Most Macs can do it out of the box. With PCs you can just throw in a spare PCI card. XP, most Linux flavors and, I believe, Windows 2000 supports dual screens.

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

Well, back in the days (I am talking 2000 LOL) I had a LaTeX course in school, didn't care for it much then, but I did start using LaTeX, and I find it easy. Though I have to admit that I hate using it in Windows, because it's a huge download. LOL But in Linux, I don't even use a GUI for it, just open your command prompt and start up vi (vi document.tex) and you're TeXing away

It seems hard at first, but once you know the basic commands, really you can not beat LaTeX. I think I wrote a beginner tutorial on it here, though I am not sure.