On Thursday 09 July 2009 09:43:36 am John Beardmore wrote: > John Culleton wrote: > > Interestingly enough two of the books on TeX are now free for > > download on the web, but I paid money for a used copy of one > > because I find a bound copy easier to use than a ring binder. > > Could you let us know the URLs for those please ? > > > Cheers, J/. Well my first book was "The TeXBook" which is canonical but a bit difficult.
I bought "TeX for the Impatient." Here is the pdf download: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/impatient/ I downloaded but did not buy "TeX by Topic" http://eijkhout.net/texbytopic/texbytopic.html because I did not find it as easy to use. I also read "A Gentle Introduction to TeX" and bought "A Beginner's Book of TeX." N.B. These are plain TeX books and not LaTeX books. Unlike most TeXers I find LaTeX verbose, confining and too prone to have conflicts between styles. I rather work with an amalgam of TeX primitive commands, plain TeX commands Pdftex commands, eplain, a table writer from TeXsys, and where necessary Context, a more modern replacement for LaTeX controlled by a single individual. In short I like starting with the following complete TeX file: ------------------------------------ Hello world. \bye ------------------------------------- and building as I need to. Fortunately most primitive and plain TeX commands work in LaTeX also. Most LaTeXers don't know this however. To each their own. Since Scribus 1.3.5 has an exit into pdflatex and some other processes I would like to have an exit into pdftex as well. That would eliminate most of the preamble needed for Pdftex. -- John Culleton Create Book Covers with Scribus/e-book $5.95 http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html
