Hi John, > It ain't gonna work. I did have TeX and LaTeX installed at one time. > Couldn't even figure out how to launch either one of them, let alone > use them.
As Greg pointed out, you don't have to launch anything but a text editor to write a LaTeX file. > And I have perused texts at Powell's Technical Books > about them. The texts will not suffice. Maybe you found the wrong books. A personally prefer the books of Helmut Kopka on LaTeX. They are written for bloody beginners an advanced users alike, and I know at least some of them are translated to English (do a google search on Helmut + Kopka + LaTeX). > In my linguistics classes I could never learn the subject just from > the textbook. Once the prof has explained the subject in a lecture > and there has been a class discussion of it, only then does the > textbook finally start to make sense. That sounds strange to me. What will you do when you finished your studies? There is no prof to explain things to you then. You will have to gather information yourself, from books and other sources. That's what studies are all about, at least in Germany: training people to work autonomously. The job of teachers and profs is being a guide in achieving that goal. > You guys ascribe to me far more ability with computers than I > have. Look, when I wrote my Ph. D. (history, not math or natural science), which consisted of no less than c. 800 pages, I was a bloody newcomer to computers. I was fighting hard with word processors, because some things are hard to achieve. Also, I started with Word, which is a disaster when it comes to long and complex texts. I then moved to StarOffice. It did the job, but was a bit slow at that time (5.1). A friend of mine did me the favour of installing Linux on my machine and recommended LaTeX. I bought a book (from Kopka), and I was impressed by its simplicity and elegance. It was way easier than working with a word processor. > And even if I could do it, why spend the time it would take? Scribus > I can already handle with a negligible learning curve. I'd say the learning curve for Scribus or any other DTP software is steeper than for LaTeX ;) > All I need is a > usable OpenType font with all the IPA characters as well as cool > DTP characters. Fonts I have some rudimentary understanding of. I > even used Fontographer to make personal changes to fonts once a > long time ago. Frankly, it would be less work to buy Fontlab and > make the font I need than to learn TeX. > > Plus, I must repeat myself, even if I learned TeX, it does not do > anything for the other half of my goal -- to make available an open > source DTP + IPA font that ALL linguistics students can use. > As others pointed out, the fonts are already there. And if you really can modify or create fonts that print well, you will certainly be able to use LaTeX, because the former requires advanced knowledge and experience in font technologies, aesthetics, and the history of typesetting. Don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure if scribus is the software of choice for your goal, while I am quite sure LaTeX is. BTW: Could it be possible that you tried to understand TeX instead of LaTeX? If you read a book on TeX, I would understand your confusion, because TeX is really esoteric, even for programmers (I have been told). Cheers, Christoph
