[ILUG] LaTeX training

[Peter Flynn]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 November 2006 17:33, Cian Davis wrote:
> 
>> I'm on the research training committee in UL, which is trying to define
>> a training schedule for researchers. There is a Word training session as
>> well as managing large documents.
>>
>> I pointed out that Word is shite, particularly for large documents and
>> tables etc., and suggested LaTeX. Of course the question was, do you
>> know anyone who could teach that?
>>
>> So starting out, it would be the basics and then working forward with a
>> particular emphasis on using it to write a thesis. Remember that will
>> there will be IT research students, there will be Humanities and the
>> likes as well - so they would need to be able to teach to both :-)
>
> 1. The king of LaTeX (and XML) in Ireland is Peter Flynn, of UCC
> <pflynn at ucc.ie>.

Flattery gets you everywhere :-)

> He has written an introductory book on LaTeX,
> and would I am sure be worth contacting.

Yes, anyone is very welcome to use it. It's at 
http://research.silmaril.ie/latex
and on CTAN as well (incl source, natch).

It was designed for people writing books/articles/theses, both 
commercially and academically, and I use it in the LaTeX course in UCC 
for exactly that purpose (1-day intensive, oversubscribed by 18 times 
this summer), as well as for business training.

By design it does apply both the Humanities and Natural Sciences. It's
platform-independent, although my Unix bias probably shows (I recommend 
postgraduates to use something like Ubuntu unless they positively need 
full binary compatibility with Microsoft).

It needs an update in places, which I have scheduled for over the 
Yuletide holiday.

> 2. There is an Irish TeX/LaTeX group ITALIC
> although I don't think it is currently very active.

http://listserv.heanet.ie/italic-l.html
It has flurries but we don't have a critical mass.

> 3. The best place to ask any questions on LaTeX
> is the newsgroup comp.text.tex
> which is incredibly active.

Yep. And check the FAQ first at http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq

> 4. The TeX User Group (TUG) produces a CD (or CDs), TexLive,
> which contains a huge amount of TeX/LaTeX software.

DVD and CD. I usually get 100 of these to hand out, but 2005 are all 
gone (download the ISO from a TUG mirror). There hasn't been a 2006 one 
yet, AFAIK, (a) because Thomas Esser has drawn back from teTeX now and 
(b) because there haven't really been many changes to the binaries, 
although development work on packages obviously goes on at the normal rate.

The only really significant piece of news is that UCC will be hosting 
the 2008 TUG Conference, probably July 2008, and I'll be calling for 
suck^H^H^H^Hvolunteers to help...let all your TeX users know it's in 
Ireland that year...we'll want papers!

///Peter