The \year=2000 TeX calendar

Karpe writes "For those of you who don't read comp.text.tex, they are offering a calender for next year." Click below for more details - it's pretty cool. " The TeX merchandising project proudly presents:

The \year=2000 TeX calendar

Features:

• Y2K compliant :-)
• format ISO A4
• 13 pages (12 month plus titel)
• each month with a picture by Duane Bibby from the books by Donald Knuth
• titel picture by Duane Bibby especially for this calendar
• protective cover and backcover
• wrap-around binding
• printed with 1200 dpi on 120g paper

This is a limited edition - it's printed on demand.

Price: DM 20 plus postage (3 DM Germany, 8 DM Europe, 16 DM rest of the world (air)).

Available \emph{now} from the TeX Merchandising Project.

The title picture and the calendarium can be seen at this web site

Eagerly awaiting your orders Martin"

Comments

Re:What the FUCK are you guys talking about?

[YoJ]

Put simply, TeX brought typesetting to the masses. Knuth invented TeX because he was tired of sending manuscripts with complicated equations to the typesetter and getting back garbage. TeX allows anyone with a little patience and willpower to typeset virtually anything they want. (I use LaTeX, an extension to TeX, so my comments might only be applicable to LaTeX).

Advantages of TeX

There are many advantages of (La)TeX over other document creation systems.

• TeX output looks great. Nothing looks more professional than TeX.
• Once you know the basics it is faster to create complicated documents with LaTeX than with anything else. LaTeX automatically handles hyphenation, line spacing, section title placement, equation numbering, figure placement and numbering, etc. When you want to refer to "equation 5", you refer to it by name. When you later add a new equation before "equation 5", your reference is automatically updated. Some word processors have this feature, but it is more of a "tacked on" thing than in TeX.
• Typing in equations is much faster in TeX. Once you know the names of the symbols, it is possible to type mathematical equations faster than writing them on paper. TeX has every symbol imaginable. With Word (for example), you must hunt-and-peck for symbols on a chart. If your symbol isn't there, you're SOL.
• TeX includes many many packages that other people have written for just about anything you could possibly want TeX to do. Want to typeset some Java code so keywords are bold, comments are italics, and everything else is roman font? There's a package to do it. How about a package to draw graphs? Yes. All this is possible because TeX is a programming language for typesetting. Fortunately, you don't need to use all its features just to produce a document. But the power is there, waiting to be used.
• Customizability. If you find yourself typing "with regard to" over and over, you can define a command \wrt that expands to "with regard to". Suppose you invent some new notation. Then just define a command for it and never worry about how the notation is generated. Then if you ever want to change your notation, you can change the definition. All your notation will instantly change, without any of the bother of searching for each time you used the notation. This is incredibly useful. Before I printed out my thesis, I previewed it with vectors written with an arrow above the vector quantity, and with vectors in boldface type. It was a one-line change.

I think that TeX is most appropriate for creating documents that clearly and simply convey information. It is the ideal tool for writing papers to be published in academic journals. Everything about TeX is designed with communication in mind. The default margins are wider than most other word processors. This is because people have a hard time reading wide columns of text. Look at any good book and count the number of words across a column. It will be the same as the number of words in a default TeX column.

Disadvantages of TeX

• There is a learning curve. TeX is a deep system. Learning TeX is a never-ending journey. Initially it can be painful and unproductive. Many people get discouraged.
• Using TeX is not interactive. TeX by itself is a "compiler". Given a source file, it produces an output file suitable for printing. Writing TeX can often become more frustrating than programming. Silly syntactic errors can stop the compile from completing. It gets old reTeXing after every change in your file.
• It is often hard to make formatting changes. The formatting system is complex. For example, to change margins or line spacing is not as simple as grabbing a slider.
• It is sometimes hard to tell what a given section of source file produces. \delta is different than seeing the delta symbol.

There are several expensive commercial systems based on TeX that provide an easy-to-use interface. There is also LyX, which is GPL. I do not have much experience with these, so I don't know effective they are.

-Nathan Whitehead