[GRLUG] LaTeX books

[john-thomas richards]

On Sun, Aug 03, 2008 at 11:48:10AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
[snip]

> One thing you gotta remember: LaTeX is a programming language for
> Typesetting and a damn good one for it. Its not hard, just very capable
> and lotsa stuff you can do with it if you include lotsa of the already
> made stuff from the past years. Many distributions have nearly an
> unbelievable mountain of add-ons. Modern ones are using "texlive" now
> and its very very good and mostly bug free, as bug free as the previous
> stuff, thanks to regression testing.
> 
> Now, don't let it overwhelm you, many people do. Just follow the
> guidelines that the "LaTeX book" shows you and it'll be an awesome
> start.

I'm in with LaTeX for the long haul.  I have already forsaken OO.o and
use LaTeX almost exclusively, unless I am just writing random thoughts
or notes for a longer document (in which case I make a plaintext file
with vim).  It's only been a few months or so but I think I am already
to the intermediate stage.  I was even able to copy a university's
document class and modify it (a little) to match (mostly) the
requirements for my master's program.

> Just as an Example, the guy that does: 
> 	http://blog.cooklikeyourgrandmother.com/
> 
> Good friend of mine in Cleveland, Ohio, published his book, he is an
> admitted Windows turned Linux guy that struggled with Docs forever with
> Word/OpenOffice... etc.
> 
> Got him to try to publish his awesome cookbook using LaTeX, with the
> book as a guide. Now he keeps the revisions in SVN. That is the other
> benefit of using LaTeX, versioning and revisions are SOOO DUMB EASY to
> keep track of.
> 
> Good luck jtr.
> 
> P.S. One last thing, OO.o v2.4 and after can take Word docs and export
> them as LaTeX (verson 2e)docs. You'll need to clean them up but with
> significantly large (or large sets) of Docs this might be a big plus.

Fortunately I do not have any Word docs needing to be converted.  :-)
-- 
john-thomas
------
Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can save a
couple of hours in the library.
Frank H. Westheimer, chemistry professor (1912- )