[lug] LaTeX, margins, font size

[D. Stimits]

"J. Wayde Allen" wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, D. Stimits wrote:
> 
> > No book, no money :(
> 
> OK, hence the resume' right?

There is a "strong correlation" here (beyond 99.99%)
:)

> 
> > There are quite a few LaTeX tutorials and HOWTO's it seems, but not many
> > purely reference URL's, giving that list of all parameters.
> 
> Yes and no.  In a sense, I think you are experiencing the documentation
> barrier that people new to Linux run into.  There is a lot of information,
> the problem is that the documentation base has been growing for so long
> that the glut of info has become hard to navigate.  There doesn't appear
> to be a nice one stop URL that points you in all the right directions.  I
> have always thought this was one of the weaknesses of LaTeX.  So far I've
> found the books to be good.  Maybe because they were written in the
> pre-web days, or maybe it is just that a book orders and consolidates
> things in a more phychologically pleasing way?  (You can see how big the
> book is, it has a beginning and an end, and as such you kind of know when
> you are done, rather than following the seemingly endless hypertext loops
> on the web?)

I guess I'm just used to UNIX style man pages. It would be very pleasing
to see a man page for each tag format, e.g., "man documentclass" (even
though it could be just an html document and not really available by man
page commands). For example, a concise statement of what arguments are
available to \documentclass and \documenttype, along with an
explanation. But then I suppose it would be overwhelming to continue
this with the same sort of thing for all commands available from a given
documentclass. Basically I run into a need to look up the "function
prototype" of \documentclass, when converting from \documenttype, and
can't generally find specifics. But this is in general not the only
problem, because if I am looking these things up, I already know the
question. The real trouble starts when I want to browse commands under
particular classes of document so I can see what all I can do with that
class. I'm reminded of a Python book I have, which has not only an index
of Python commands and widgets, but also a picture of what each widget
does. So I can, without reading the whole book, browse through the index
and have a very good idea of what I can do just skimming through. This
is in fact my really big reason for wanting some sort of gui for
this...not because I dislike hand editing (I'm a vi guy, I'm strangely
thrilled by knowing exactly what goes on when I configure something),
but because it offers a sort of prompting of everything that can be
done: Just select something and hit the button to see what it does.
There is also of course the need to visualize what has been done, which
is more convenient in a one-piece WYSIWYG editor, versus multistage
production to see each keystroke result, but it is the ability to
freeform design without exact knowledge that really makes gui useful
(thus it prompts to make further creation that might not otherwise be
possible, simply because of not knowing what is available without a
long, detailed reading).

> 
> Anyway, I think we often tend to forget is that there is usually a
> good amount of documentation located locally on your machine.  I just dug
> up the following URL from my base Debian install
> <file:/usr/doc/tetex-base/texmf/index.html>.  You probably have a similar
> file.  There also should be some info and man files local to your own
> machine.  (Oh hey, I just found this documentation guide on-line in case
> you can't find it on your machine, see
> <http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/teTeX/newhelpindex.html>.)

I found this, but directories seem to be a bit rearranged now on RH,
even compared to before. There is a tendency towards the newer
filesystem hierarchy standards. For those interested, the RH index is:
file:/usr/share/texmf/doc/index.html

(my feeling here is that it should be under /usr/share/doc/texmf/,
rather than /usr/share/texmf/doc/, but that is a different story)

> 
> A collection of other useful links are:
> 
>    http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/
>    http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html
>    http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/configuring.html
>    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/publ-tips.html
>    http://www.ctan.org/

My LaTeX links are growing. The "holy grail" would have to be a set of
pages similar to man pages, listing all LaTeX commands for a given
document class, possibly with a "SEE ALSO" section for relevant older
document type syntax. Something that would allow a quick browsing of
features specific to particular styles/classes.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> - Wayde
>   (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)
> 
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