Good LaTeX book?

[oboeguy]

I have a to write a pretty big, important document in LaTeX which will result in me adding some letters after my name. I'm comfortable with LaTeX, though a bit rusty. Anybody have suggestions on a good reference? I have the good, old Lamport book, Lions and all, but I need something more advanced now. These two look pretty good:

Guide to LATEX

The LaTeX Companion

Both are apparently fairly recent editions of established books -- perfect! But I am torn between them, and maybe there's a still better one out there. Anyway, then there's the boxed set including the 2nd book up there with some more advanced books:

LaTeX Companions Boxed Set, The: A Complete Guide and Reference for Preparing, llustrating, and Publishing Technical Documents

Suggestions? (I'd post this in "Highly Technical" but who reads that? I don't)

 

[MercenaryForHire]

*shudder*

Yeah, I know what LaTeX (pronounced "Lay-Tek", as my old CS prof would never STFU about) is, unfortunately. Personally, I'd rather hand in a document written on warezed Adobe (or dumped through a printer->PDF convertor, if you wanna stay legal) than use that crap again. Ugh.

- M4H

 

[edro]

I have this book...
I will sell it to you for $1+S&H (~$6). I knew holding on to this crap from school would pay off bigtime in the future!

 

[oboeguy]

edro I appreciate the offer, but the pub date is 1993. I really need something more recent.

 

[edro]

Nooooes! Still... for ~$7! It makes a great paper weight and will add to your collection of useless CS books that you will never read since the advent of the internet!

 

[Qwest]

And you want to be my latex salesmen?
I don't think so...

 

[oboeguy]

Originally posted by: Qwest
And you want to be my latex salesmen?
I don't think so...

Posts like this one above are why I always hesitate to ask a serious question here. :roll:

 

[oboeguy]

Bump for the aternoon crowd.

 

[desteffy]

Honestly you can find some good guides/books on it for free online (in the GPL spirit). I use latex ALL the time. Often typing "latex *" into google will come up with something that will tell you how to do * in latex instantly which for me is quicker than thumbing through some books.

Btw, what editor are you using?

Edit: I did almost by some books once on it and those first two are the ones I narrowed it down to.

 

[oboeguy]

I like to mix-up a good book and online references. Which editor am I using? Why emacs, of course. I'd be glad to hear of anything better, though. I've used PCTeX before (fairly old version, I think), which is an all-in-one package for Win32.

 

[SurgicalShark]

WinEDT and TexNIC are good ones, for windows of course.

 

[desteffy]

Ok good. Emacs is the best. I have been using Texshop on OSX for a while now, it is a very good program, but I am in the process of switching over to emacs because of the macros and since I already use emacs for programming. Texshop was a good place to start though, it is very user friendly for beginners.

 

[PowerMacG5]

Download "The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e." Great pdf companion book.

 

[HokieESM]

Good stuff, oboeguy... I just finished adding three letters to the end of my name in November... so I know what kind of pain you've been through (and will go through in the next few months).

Also wrote my dissertation in LaTeX... I would highly suggest you check out TeXnicCenter if you're looking at a Windows platform. You can use Emacs, of course... you could even use vi. TeXnicCenter is a nice all-in-one that combines with MiKTeX to give you a nice GUI for LaTeX.

As far as references, a lot of other people have pointed out the web. TeXnicCenter has decent help--but to be honest, if you find a good template (especially for the bibliography) any "little" problems you have can easily be solved by typing "LaTeX <insert your problem here>" into Google. People who use LaTeX regularly are pretty fanatical--thus the good help pages.

 

[dullard]

Good luck. Just like M4H, I'd shutter at the thought of such a large LaTeX project. I've used it many times and it sucks just as much the last time as it does the first time. There are much better programs out there that can do the same thing. LaTeX (or any TeX in general) was wonderful when word processors were stuck with just the alphabet. But now its 15 years later and other software has progressed and thus there is no reason to use LaTeX anymore.

Probably the best LaTeX reference is simply a copy of another LaTeX document in your same department. Don't remember a command? Just copy it from the other student's document.



Personally, I refused to use LaTeX and wrote my document to get my letters in about a third of the time as it took everyone else who used LaTeX (my document had more equations and more pages too).

 

[HokieESM]

dullard... while I admit it has a steep learning curve, it really is quite efficient once you know it. And the print output is stellar.

And as far as writing a dissertation... if it takes ANY significant portion of your time getting a PhD, you're doing it wrong. I wrote my dissertation (all 241 pages of it) in a little over 2 weeks... combining stuff that had already been written into my journal articles and such.

That said, some of Adobe's products are nice--and MUCH more intuitive than LaTeX. Just whatever you do, don't use Word to create a 200+ page document with those horrible equations that it spits out. And the crappy justification. And the horrible way it likes to handle table of contents. I guess I would put it as Adobe > LaTeX > * > Word

 

[desteffy]

I am suprised to see someone complain about latex like that. Once you go ahead and learn it, which dosent take very long it is very powerful and fast. I even type homework in latex. I dont know what you would use instead but I can personally say that latex OWNS equation editor. It is faster to type in after even a little bit of practice, and the results look far better and are easier to chop up and combine into other documents or turn into slides.

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: desteffy
I am suprised to see someone complain about latex like that. Once you go ahead and learn it, which dosent take very long it is very powerful and fast.

I've heard that argument so many times. Like HokieESM said "People who use LaTeX regularly are pretty fanatical". I'm not going to try to persuade you any way at all. If you can get what you want done, then things are great.

By the time I was done with my PhD I was just sick of doing group projects with LaTeX fanatics. I had so many upper level math courses where I'd be stuck in a group of LaTeX people (one of which even wrote the university website devoted to the wonders of LaTeX). We'd get done with the math part of our projects and have to type it up. Typically it was in groups of 4. Everyone would grab their portion of the work and start slaving away at LaTeX. I'd grab all 4 parts and be done in Word with the whole project before anyone had finished even their 1/4th part. I'm not pushing Word - there are many other wonderful programs (just that Word was available at the university computer labs).

Originally posted by: HokieESM
And as far as writing a dissertation... if it takes ANY significant portion of your time getting a PhD, you're doing it wrong. I wrote my dissertation (all 241 pages of it) in a little over 2 weeks... combining stuff that had already been written into my journal articles and such.

Just add up the 2 weeks to the time you spent writing all those journal articles and such. Same difference.

 

[HokieESM]

Originally posted by: dullard

Originally posted by: desteffy
I am suprised to see someone complain about latex like that. Once you go ahead and learn it, which dosent take very long it is very powerful and fast.

I've heard that argument so many times. Like HokieESM said "People who use LaTeX regularly are pretty fanatical". I'm not going to try to persuade you any way at all. If you can get what you want done, then things are great.

By the time I was done with my PhD I was just sick of doing group projects with LaTeX fanatics. I had so many upper level math courses where I'd be stuck in a group of LaTeX people (one of which even wrote the university website devoted to the wonders of LaTeX). We'd get done with the math part of our projects and have to type it up. Typically it was in groups of 4. Everyone would grab their portion of the work and start slaving away at LaTeX. I'd grab all 4 parts and be done in Word with the whole project before anyone had finished even their 1/4th part. I'm not pushing Word - there are many other wonderful programs (just that Word was available at the university computer labs).

Originally posted by: HokieESM
And as far as writing a dissertation... if it takes ANY significant portion of your time getting a PhD, you're doing it wrong. I wrote my dissertation (all 241 pages of it) in a little over 2 weeks... combining stuff that had already been written into my journal articles and such.

Just add up the 2 weeks to the time you spent writing all those journal articles and such. Same difference.

The articles weren't in LaTeX--the content still had to be ported over. But I did use a "standardized" template for the dissertation--which took out 90% of the headache.

Which is the best thing to do with LaTeX... as you mentioned, is to find someone else's template. Inserting figures and citations in LaTeX is its BEST feature--it mindlessly numbers and creates tables of contents, figures, and tables AND the bibliography. With a good template, its just cut and pasting text into the template... and that's easy. Equations are easy. Inserting eps figures (the best to use for printing anyways) is easy. But you're absolutely right--writing the header is an absolute beast--a million and one commands that you really don't need to know or care about. With close to 300 references, it was worth using LaTeX just to manage them all--that and after writing my MS thesis in Word (and having it crash as it approached 300MB) pretty much made me run away.

 

[oboeguy]

Wow, I go for a bike ride and this thread explodes with activity. Dunno if I mentioned it in this thread before, but I've used equation editor quite a bit as well. Sometimes it's easier to write exams and such that way. However, I'm setting on using LaTeX for this, for a number of reasons; lifting a ton of notation from stuff that's already written, for one. Also, I've been at this gig long enough that the last thing I need is another reason for people to look at me funny in my department (using Word would definitely solicit some funny looks).