[OS X TeX] texstart page & document

[Will Robertson]

Hi all

Based on some feedback, I've done a little more on both my texstart page 
and sample document. 
(<http://www.mecheng.adelaide.edu.au/~will/texstart/> for now until it's 
done.)

I've linked to Rebecca's document (obviously both pages will be 
relocated to the Mac TeX page when complete if they're up to scratch) as 
the next resource to read after mine. I expect she should in turn link 
to Joe's "Getting Started". I'll probably link to Gerben's as well.

All of these documents should have their place in a chain of increasing 
TeX knowledge. I hope we're not reinventing the wheel.

Anyway, feedback on what I've done:

Mahakk suggested better wording for the titles, and also recommended 
that the sample document should get its own box. I agreed with him, and 
made the changes.

Alain suggested more preamble text to explain that the user had to push 
"Typeset" to get the PDF. Again, I agree, this has now been changed.


 > Herb Schulz wrote:
> The 'article' option of the memoir class still uses \chapter{} and the
> \section{} numbering is "chapter.section" not just "section." as with the
> actual article class. It also, by default, uses offset odd/even pages. Both
> of these are things that a newbie might not understand.

I always thought that the article option was supposed to change the 
heading numbering to "section." as you say. Turns out I was mixed up. 
That's fixed by changing all the \section commands to \chapter .

Good point about the margins. I've changed that now with some explanation.



William F. Adams wrote:

 >  - why the geography-specific (A4) pagesize?
 >    Wouldn't it be better to use (say) 11" tall x 210mm wide? That way
 > everyone has the same version and it'll print (but w/ slightly different
 > margins) w/o scaling on either A4 or letter.
 >    Or, better stilly, use a screen-oriented layout / size --- enable
 > hyperref for that and suggest people open it in Adobe Acrobat for
 > reference.

I'm not sure. I'm trying to make it as simple as I can, and I think the 
commands required for this might clutter up the preamble even more. 
Also, when I changed the paper sizes, the text location needed 
moving---and I don't really know where to move it to.

> - provide a link / location for lshort

I will organise all of the hyperlinking at the end.


> - mention that the ``Templates'' button in the toolbar in TeXshop
> will get one a working template w/ suitable preamble in the preamble
> section

Ah, I was going to bring this up. I was going to suggest that the 
preamble TeXShop uses is rather out of date and a new one (maybe similar 
to the top of my sample document) be included, along with table and 
figure templates. (My biased opinion would be to base them again on my 
sample document.)

> 
> - why are the figures set to come out on a figure page? why not use
> [htbp] and explain what they do and encourage experimentation?

Good call. This has been changed. I initially did that out of laziness.

> 
> - buncha overfull lines --- use \begin{sloppypar}...\end{sloppypar}
> and explain what it fixes, or just stick in a \sloppy at the
> beginning.

I knew about the overfulls, but I don't want to add any more complexity. 
I'll work out ways to adjust the words in the paragraphs to fix the 
problem if necessary.

> I've got a fair first pass at ``All the fonts in GWTeX'' (put it
> together for a salesperson here at work). Let me finish up my paper
> and TUG2003 and I'll post it and we can work to improve it.

How convenient! That would be fantastic.


Comments are what makes me make this document better. Please keep 'em 
coming.

Will Robertson
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