[ILUG] LaTeX (was Red Hat in Easons.)

[Chris Higgins]

> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Paul Jakma wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> >
> > > (Okay, I admit it's not exactly trivial to use, but it's still top
> >
> > lyx is though
> >
> This is something that I've been meaning to check out for a while now. How
> many people around here use TeX (or some relation) for writing documents?
> I know Caolan used to swear by it (which made a change from me swearing at
> ms word). Can anyone tell me what's so good about it etc?

I'm a LaTeX (rather than TeX) head...  I *cannot* cope with Word (or the like)
if I want to write a document, I want to be able to manage the look and feel -
I want consistency across the entire document..

I've recently had to change the formatting of a number of powerpoint 
documents..
I had to go to each slide, change font of text, change placement, change
headings, change colour, change..... on each slide... Don't tell me there is
a global change - because while you can change some stuff globally it's only 
if powerpoint knows what each component of the slide is supposed to be... 


With LaTeX that mess is taken away from you - you mark each portion of the
text as to what it should be, not how it should look - and then globally you
tell LaTeX how each thing should look.. so the style is applied globally rather
than locally to each character..

This means that you can cut/paste/move text willy-nilly and all references are
automatically fixed up, all page numbering stays correct (even when moving
stuff between documents)... 

Once you have the content written, you can then tune the look and feel 
for presentation - I find with word and it's like that you are continually
changing between "that doesn't look right" and "that doesn't read right"..
With LaTeX - you only worry about the "that doesn't read right", and then
you deal with the "look right" stuff all together, and consistently across
the entire document.

You can also get damn good conversion tools from LaTeX source to .ps / .pdf /
.html etc..

You can edit via your favourite text editor, you can script changes, you can
automatically include images / source code / etc..

There used even be a 'imake' config for LaTeX (although I haven't
seen any recent versions) - so I write my own make files....


Then I go edit for a while, and do a 'make', all images are automatically
included, latest copies of all source files automatically included, references
and pages numbers adjusted automatically (because source code at end of
chapter one is now 3 pages as opposed to one page long) etc..


Once I settle on a template for my documents, I can use that consistently
across all my documents - and if I decide to change the formatting of my
template - I can easily re-apply that to all my documents.. without having
to edit or change them...

Writing without LaTeX is like trying to admin Unix systems without a root
user account..

(do you get the idea that I might like it :)


-------------------------------------
Hello World in LaTeX

\documentclass[a4paper,twoside,10pt]{article}
\pagenumbering{roman}
\pagestyle{plain}

\title{Hello World}
\author{I Lug my Linux}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Start of text}
Hello World
\end{document}


-------------------------------------
-- 
** Chris Higgins                         e: chris.higgins at horizon.ie **
** Technical Business Development        tel: +353-1-6204916            **
** Horizon Technology Group              fax: +353-1-6204949            **

CCSI# 23364