TeX

[Michael Whapples]

I would agree with the responses that LaTeX (or TeX which LaTeX is based
on) is good for producing documents, particularly if there are things
like mathematical equations. While it is good, the idea is to try and
remove some of the formatting from the author so that they can
concentrate on the content, but this sometimes means that when you want
a specific formatting  you may need to wrestle with TeX to tell it what
you really want to have shown, and sometimes it can seem like TeX will
not give in. Examples may be things like positioning of images (TeX is
meant to try and pick the best place for it, you can specify you want it
here, top of page, bottom of page, in any order or combination), but if
TeX really feels that it should go elsewhere on the page it will keep
trying and ignore your command, so you need to try and tweak the text
around it or the image size until TeX gives in. I can think of other
examples where I have had to hunt around for a satisfactory solution for
how something should be presented when I have been using LaTeX.

While that above seems unfavourable towards TeX, I don't mean it to be,
I am really glad for TeX in some cases, but sometimes for simple short
documents TeX is more than is really needed and you may end up spending
longer fighting TeX than it would have taken you with a WYSIWYG editor.

There are many different TeX systems and packages, offering all sorts of
features, different output formats, different TeX commands for certain
structures, etc. The other thing is that there is a huge amount of TeX
open source software, allowing you if you have the time to add the
features you want if they don't already exist.

From
Michael Whapples
On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 16:10 -0700, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hello,
>     I have heard a great deal about the use of TeX and LateX by the blind to do 'structured documents'.  I'm wondering if this package would be appropriate for things like essays, with fairly specific formatting requirements.  (I could always use a Windows word processor to do the same, but I get less feedback with those than I feel comfortable with.)
> If this is indeed the case, could anybody recommend a good site for learning the fundamentals?  I've heard of a publication called the TeXbook, but can't find an accessible version.
> Thanks much in advance,
> Zack.
>