Re: [stellation-res] (Paper stuff)

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 16:35, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "Stellation-res" <stellation-res@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 6:19 AM
> Subject: Re: [stellation-res] (Paper stuff)
> 
> 
> > On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 16:09, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> > > >
> > > > We'll be writing the document in latex.
> > > >
> > > Does this mean that all markup has to done by hand and that I need to
> learn
> > > the Latex system. I am used to preparing initial documents in MS-Word
> and
> > > then converting to Acrobat for distribution to cross-platform
> environments.
> >
> > Yes, it means that all markup is done using latex commands in text
> > files. And yes, it means learning some basics of latex. Believe me,
> > latex is not that difficult for normal documents. I'll happily put
> > together a two or three page primer that teaches you the basics, which
> > is all that you'll need. Any layout problems, I'll take care of.
> 
> I presume that there are books available that cover Latex and Tex?
> I guess I am just used to having the computer do the grunt work :-)

There are plenty of books on latex. Don't waste your time reading
a book on tex: the deep and gory details of how it does layout are
irrelevant if you're using latex.

You also probably don't need a book. There are a lot of latex tutorials
floating around the web for free.

And latex really isn't that primitive. It's not like doing manual
layout. It's mostly structural layout at a fairly high level. It's not
WYSIWYG, but it's far from manual.

For example, to write a section header, you do:
\section{Section Title}

What a section header looks like, handling section numbering, pre-header
space, preventing widowed section headers, and all of the gory
typesetting details of handling a section are taken care of by latex.

Latex automatically takes care of all of the details of formatting,
floating and positioning figures, cross-referencing, and generating
bibliographies. It's really quite a fantastic system. There's a reason
that it's managed to be so dominant in technical writing. 


> > I would rather strangle myself than try to write a technical
> > paper in word; not to mention the fact that I don't even own a
> > copy of it!
> 
> That's a little extreme :-)

My limited experiences with word have been *extremely* bad. 8^)

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
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