[Trisquel-users] Re : Floss Latex
I will try to explain (probably with many imprecisions: sorry for the
purists) making a parallel with programming... so I hope you know the basics
of a programming activity.
TeX and LaTeX are typesetting languages. 'tex' and 'latex' are the names of
the commands to interpret the TeX or LaTeX languages. They turn the text
into a DVI file, which is then usually turned into a PDF file with 'dvipdf'
('pdflatex' directly produces a PDF file). Like a compiler turns a source
code into an executable binary.
LaTeX can be considered a superset of TeX, like C++ is a superset of C. You
certainly want to learn LaTeX and not TeX. For the same reason that you
should styles in LibreOffice: in LaTeX, you write what you want and not how
to do it (as in TeX), hence focusing on the content.
LaTeX is extensible with packages, the equivalent of a libraries in a
programming language. And there exist many fonts. And independent tools
(e.g., BiBTeX for formatting references). The so-called LaTeX distribution
group all that in a coherent whole. You want to rely on the "TeX Live"
distribution. It is the best LaTeX distribution, it is packaged in Trisquel
in many parts. In this way, you do not have to install all "TeX Live" to
only use a tiny part of it. The "texlive" meta-package depends on a
reasonable subset, i.e., triggers the installation of all the most popular
packages. But there is "texlive-full" too, if you want.
To write the text that will be interpreted with 'latex' or 'pdflatex', you
can use *any* text editor, like you can use any text editor to write in C++.
However there are sorts of IDE or LaTeX. That is what we were discussing.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Floss Latex
There is LyX that inkoia mentioned here that follows a WYSIWYM ("what you see
is what you mean") approach, where what shows up on the screen is an
approximation of what will show up on the page.
You can always open a text editor in one half of the screen and the document
viewer in the other half. GNOME's Document Viewer automatically reloads the
document when it is modified. With GNOME 3's window manager, just drag the
window to left/right border of the screen (and there are keyboard shortcuts
too) so that it takes half of the screen. I do not know if it is that simple
with other window manager.
Emacs can display PDF too. And it can vertically splits its window with C-x
3, so that the .tex is opened in the left buffer (with the default LaTeX mode
or AUCTeX) and the DVI in the right one. The DVI can automatically reload
the file when modified. Just add this line in ~/.emacs:
(add-hook 'doc-view-mode-hook 'auto-revert-mode)
[Trisquel-users] Re : Floss Latex
I think he meant sorts of IDEs for LaTeX. That: an "f" was missing.
[Trisquel-users] Re : Floss Latex
Well, yes... but almost nothing more. Once you know Emacs, you can be productive in AUCTeX by learning very few new commands: C-c C-e to insert an environment (whose name is auto-completed, of course), C-c C-s to insert a (sub)(sub)section (same thing), M-Enter to insert \item, C-c C-c to compile-recompile-visualize (handles BibTex too) and the C-c C-f C-[ebtcfisra] for the different fonts. I know there is much more but that is basically what it already is very efficient.
