On Thursday 09 July 2009 04:27:53 pm John Culleton wrote: > 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.
Last phrase should read "...needed for pdflatex." -- John Culleton Create Book Covers with Scribus/e-book $5.95 http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html
