[ILUG] LaTeX training

[Conall O'Brien]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 06:00:36PM GMT, Liam McDermott 
<theirishmole at gmail.com> incoherently babbled:

> Often Latex editors will only accept pics files in eps format, and
> trying to manually format pages is a pain in the hole.

What's that then there Ted? 

pdflatex lets you use pngs with no special configuration and there are
are common modules which also allow you to use jpgs
 
> It is however handy when you have a class file for the docs your writing.
> 
> I think you need a fair bit of tech knowledge to use it though, its
> closer to web programming/html than most people will be used to.

I believe the technical term is "markup language". 

> Its not out of the box easy to use.

Sure it is, it's just a editing text file...

>  I think any training will spend a lot
> of time getting people to be able to do anything with it, let alone
> using advanced features.

Many consider "Advanced Features" in LaTeX to be extensive usage of the
graphics packages like Xy-Pic, Metafont, etc. Layouts aren't too
difficult, once you've tried a few ideas out...


Anyway, to get back on topic. The original guide which I learnt LaTeX
from 5 years ago and used to run tutorials for college freshers over the 
last two years - http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/


It's also good as a general reference source, but as I said, the more
advanced features include graphics packages. For those, I go back to my
friend who showed me how to use such features [1], or scan through the
LaTeX {,Graphics} Companion books which reside in my bookshelf


[1] he has a few online LaTeX docs available from 
http://www.edsko.net/latex/ 

-- 

Conall O'Brien

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