Hi There,
Where can I download the Mandrake packages for LaTex? I am planning to use it with all my paper work afterwards. If anyone can tell me where to find a tutorial about install LaTex it should be very great. By the way, Can anyone compare it with word processor such as KWORD? Many thanks.
The LaTeX packages are part of the standard download edition. The packages you want are tetex-latex and tetex-dvips.
There is no comparison between LaTeX and a wordprocessor! LaTeX is a markup language, like HTML (it's essentially a set of macros for the TeX typesetting system). For example, to put some text in italics, you'd type \emph{this text is in italics}.
If this doesn't appeal, there is a nice graphic front-end to LateX called LyX, which is also available in the standard Mandrake distribution. Although it looks like a word processor at first sight, some things in the LaTeX world are very different, so work through the tutorial in the Help pages before you do anything else.
Whether LyX is right for you depends a lot on what kind of documents you want to produce. LyX is great for academic, scientific and some kinds of technical writing - basically anything which has a "normal" format. If you want to do something like a magazine, where you need to do a lot of complicated stuff with frames and use a variety of fonts, you might be better off with KWord or Scribus, which is a TeX-based DTP application. For example, I used LyX to write a coursebook recently, but designed the cover page with Scribus (I could have done it in LyX, but it would have required inputting a lot of raw LaTeX code, and I couldn't be bothered).
See http://www.ling.upenn.edu/advice/latex.html for general information on LaTeX, and http://www.lyx.org for info on LyX. A good page for using LyX for DTP is http://katspace.net/lyx/lyxhow.php
Sir Robin
-- "Certitude is possible for those who only own one encyclopedia." - Robert Anton Wilson
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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