Learning TeX?

[Shreyas Sampat]

So, I've searched the fora for this, and though I've come across a lot of recommendations for TeX as a teyesetting medium, I can't find any resources on learning it, here or on the ever-shifting tides of the Web.  Does anyone have suggestions?

[Clay]

Four Willows,

If you're a windows user I highly recommend MikTeX, from http://www.miktex.org.  In the documentation portion (which you will need to dig into the \textmf directory to find) is a very nice guide to starting LaTeX.

Realistically, a book is a pretty nice thing.  My favorite is "A Guide to LaTeX" by Helmut Kopka & Patrick W. Daly.  It has enough to get you going without making your head hurt, and the advanced chapters are invaluable if you want to get gutsy and start programming your own LaTeX macros.  This is important, because writing your own macros is essential to keeping your sanity in a game book.

Also make sure you grab the excellent dvipdfm package.  This is included with MikTeX, and shows up in a lot of other distributions as well.  dvipdfm is my preferred way to turn LaTeX into PDF.

Also useful is the memoir macro package, once you have your LaTeX basics down.  It really makes changing the styles in a larger document a lot easier.  I am not aware of any distribution which includes memoir, but it's easy enough to install - just copy the folder with the memoir macros into the folder where all your other packages are stored.

Almost all of the recommendations for LaTeX on this board have come from me.  That's because I'm a UNIX fanatic, and there aren't other viable options for page layout on UNIX, short of shelling out $1200 for FrameMaker.

Be warned that LaTeX is completely controlled in code.  This is no visual interface to it.  That little drawback restricts it primarily to programmers, who spend their days things about the world that way anyway.  It hasn't bothered me any, because I'm a programmer by day as well, and I get really pretty results (see http://www.obrienscafe.com/microwar.pdf for an example of what can be done without any effort).

Drop me a private note if you need help with LaTeX.

[Christoffer Lernö]

OR you could just say that writing it in a wordprocessor is good enough for now and use openoffice which is a Word  caliber free wordprocessor available for linux and windows (an OSX port coming along too)

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Christoffer,

Your suggestion had nothing to do with the request made by 'four willows weeping'. When someone asks a question on the Forge, we either answer it, or if we don't know the answer, we listen for it.

We do not, however, discourage people from doing what they want to do.

I know all that sounded harsh - it wasn't meant to be. It is, however, the face of the new Forge. We're here to help people - that was our original point, and we're going to keep doing it as we grow.

[talysman]

OR you could just say that writing it in a wordprocessor is good enough for now and use openoffice which is a Word  caliber free wordprocessor available for linux and windows (an OSX port coming along too)

Clinton already said this isn't quite what four willows weeping is looking for, but it leads me to suggest Writer2LaTeX, a java program that translates OpenOffice XML documents into LaTex documents. I also found references to HTML-to-LaTeX coverters as well. granted, this still doesn't suggest where to find basic LaTeX information (but Clay has already suggested some resources.) still, the lack of WYSIWYG for LaTeX on Windows is going to be an obstacle for some people.

heck, it's an obstacle for me. I do code some things by hand, but I prefer tools that do the work for me. so when I saw that LaTeX WYSIWYG tools like LyX are not available on Windows systems, I set aside LaTeX as a possibility for now.

maybe hunting down those LaTeX resources Clay suggested will change my mind, however. thanx, Clay!

oh, and for anyone interested in Writer2LaTeX, here is the link I found:

http://www.hj-gym.dk/~hj/writer2latex/

the limitation is that it seems to be designed for mathematics texts, not RPGs or illustrated texts.  so if four willows weeping wants to use some kind of WYSIWYG process to do the "gruntwork" for the layout, then go back and fix up the LaTeX code for more specific effects, the HTML2TeX converter might be more useful:

http://home.planet.nl/~faase009/html2tex.html

this would allow doing the basic format in a free HTML editor and then converting it. the drawback is: no binaries; you need to compile the html2tex.c source code.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Thank you, all.  I'm indeed a Win user; I've been poking around the MikTeX docs for something better than sketchy.  It turns out my university library has a copy of the Kopka & Daly book you recommended, Clay, so I'll have a chance to look through it.  I'm aware of the programming aspect of TeX, incidentally, but thanks for the warning.  It's definitely a little intimidating at first glance.

As for graphics, it'd be nice to have access to those, but at the moment I don't really have any artwork to speak of for my game, so I can hold off.  I believe I can get Pagemaker or something to that effect when I'm in serious need of pdf graphics capabilities and display fonts.

[Clay]

Four Willows,

If you do decide to stick with LaTeX, I can give a hand with the graphics.  Finding information about graphics in LaTeX is daunting, because there are many different packages for handling graphics, and they all do more or less the same thing, but in different ways.  It gets more complicated once you introduce color images, and need to generate a PDF document.

To get a look at what it can do, check out the layout that I did for first edition Dominion Rules and a character sheet.   The game has come out with a second edition, and mercifully I did not do the layout.  The game is available from Dominion Games and is created by Michael Bourland.


The Daly & Kopka book, by the way, can show you a lot of what you need to know about using display fonts in your document.  I haven't used them in a project, but I did have some fun experimenting with embedding TrueType fonts in PDF documents using LaTeX.

[Shreyas Sampat]

I just thought I'd announce this for the edification of anyone else thinking about using (La)TeX: A texteditor called WinEdt's available (at http://www.winedt.com) that has TeX syntax highlighting capabilities, and a lot of built-in TeX functionality.  It's great; in combination with MikTeX it makes TeX very approachable.