[lug] LaTeX, margins, font size

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, D. Stimits wrote:

> No book, no money :(

OK, hence the resume' right?

> 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?)

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>.)

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/

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