[OS X TeX] Faint of heart ...

[William F. Adams]

On Tuesday, May 4, 2004, at 10:10  AM, Eric Steed wrote:

> I almost hesitate to chime in here, I've only been a subscriber for
> a little over a year, and have been struggling to learn OS X TeX
> for only two or three ...

With LyX, one need not learn TeX if one merely gets a style setup and a 
matching layout file for LyX to use.

Then it's merely a matter of tagging all the text in LyX and relying on 
LaTeX to do all of the formatting.

> And yet, with an IQ of a little less than 147 and a background in
> typographic design, I am still quite lost ...

Remember the overall roadmap:

  - document-level markup --- this should be adapted to the document at 
hand and is matched by:
  - a LaTeX documentclass and appropriate packages and any macros 
specific to the job which in turn is processed by:
  - LaTeX proper which is implemented and gets much of its typographic 
capabilities form
  - TeX

Or just use Plain TeX. It's hard to get simpler than:

This is set in plain \TeX.
\vfill
\eject
\bye

I didn't know much TeX when I got started here a couple of years ago, 
and am still waiting for my copy of the LaTeX Companion to arrive, but 
with a bit of judicious searching in http://groups.google.com one can 
manage to find the answer to any query on LaTeX (and the odd bit of 
gratuituous latex-fetish pornography :(

As a recent example of this, look up Daniel Kaplan's book which was the 
last we did here --- it was the first where I really tried and 
succeeded to do things in the proper LaTeX way and it made things much 
easier:

http://www.macalester.edu/~kaplan/ScientificProgramming/index.html

If you can find the book in a bookstore or library check out pgs. 
44--46.

> It's simple more effective for me to set type by hand ...

I really wish I could find a small tabletop press to go w/ all the type 
I've accumulated or been given....

Even so, I'm probably not going to be using it to print thousands of 
copies of a 560 pg. book.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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