Newbie Write & Edit (Latex)

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 nmeyers at javalinux.net wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 11:28:09AM -0400, paul.cour1 at verizon.net wrote:
> >
> > In the context of the recent post of DTP vs Word processors, I have
> > often wondered about Latex. I recall some ole Unix Guy telling me
> > that Latex was the thing.
>
> LaTeX (The "x" is actually the Greek letter "chi", so it's pronounced
> "latek") is still around. It's a "typesetting engine" from the
> pre-WYSIWYG days, although there are WYSIWYG editors available for it.
> You can find LaTeX and LyX (a WYSIWYG front end) in many Linux
> distros.

Also, Texinfo -- the markup language used by the GNU project for
official documentation -- is related to but simpler than straight TeX.
For example, the `info` documentation pages (try `info emacs`) work with
Texinfo files, in the same way that man pages work with troff files.

Texinfo may be a gentler introduction to TeX than LaTeX these days.
Maybe -- I'm not actually a LaTeX user, but I've messed around with
Texinfo a little, and it's no more complicated than HTML (read: easy).


-- 
Chris Devers