[olug] LaTeX rocks!

[Mike Hostetler]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 10:11:29AM -0600, Matt Payne wrote:
> I bet this was a really good talk.   Learning LaTeX from examples helps me a
> lot.  Some of my LaTeX documents are at http://MattPayne.org/hws -- There's
> tricks for putting URLs into PDFs so when you click on them it fires up a web
> browser.  There's the preamble that makes tree view bookmarks work... The
> comments point to the books I took them from.

I totally agree with Matt.  My only regret in LaTeX is that I was too
lazy in college to learn it. Now, I think it's one of the best pieces of
software ever.  But the only way to learn it is via example -- looking
through a tutorial isn't helpful, but it helps to muck around with source
files.

Another great thing about LaTeX is it has almost every problem you may
have solved.  See the listing of contrib packages at
http://www.ctan.org/.  Wanna make calendars? Can do.  Wanna make sheet
music?  Can do.  I have not found anything I wanted to do with LaTeX that
someone hasn't already done, and put in CTAN or the web.

And a piece of info to note -- if you use "pdflatex" instead of "latex",
it converts it straight to PDF w/o going through a DVI file.  Not only
does this save a step, but if you use the "times' package in your LaTeX
source, the resulting PDF will be smaller (since it uses the embedded
font).

-- mikeh