New Members ⇒ Introducing new member

[Pangur]

I am a retired church minister, and use LaTeX mostly to print A5 booklets as service manuscripts for my wife, who also is a minister. I have used Memoir, ConTexT, Komascript, at various times. My favourite editor was Emacs, but for a year or more, I have been using Spacemacs. My printer is duplex enabled, and I use a long arm stapler to bind my folded A4 booklets.
My platform of choice is Linux, but have used various flavours such as Mint, Fedora, Opensuse, and Ubuntu.

I am interested in extending my knowledge of LaTeX-like document creation. I am grateful for the existence of a forum of fellow enthusiasts.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Pangur,

welcome to the forum!

It's great to read that you have good reasons to use LaTeX. I know emacs but I never heard of Spacemacs. I will take a look! I use TeXworks on Linux and on the Mac.

Stefan

[Johannes_B]

Welcome to the forum,

you said you used memoir and ConTeXt and KOMA-script. Users usually stay with one, congratulations

I myself use vim for any texts i need to write. Also using Linux, currently a simple Ubuntu.

[Pangur]

Hi Pangur,

welcome to the forum!

It's great to read that you have good reasons to use LaTeX. I know emacs but I never heard of Spacemacs. I will take a look! I use TeXworks on Linux and on the Mac.

Stefan

Thanks for the welcome, Stefan.

Spacemacs is a version of Emacs with Vim-like keys. They claim it is the best of both worlds I have tried TeXworks and TexStudio, and enjoyed them. My wife has a Mac, and I avoid it as much as I can, as it is alien to me

One of the things that I like to do is mimic the traditional verse numbering of the Bible, by putting the verse numbers in a superscript. Of course, I could go through the passage manually, and put \textsuperscript{} around each verse number. However, that is fairly tedious, and easy to make a typo, or even miss a verse number out. That is where I rely on the regex capabilities of Emacs. I ask it to look for \([0-9]+\) * and wherever it is found to substitute \\textsuperscript{\1}. After pressing return, it jumps to the first number it sees, and asks for a y or n. If I press y, it turns the number to superscript.

I also use \tabbing{} quite a lot for the lyrics of hymns. This means entering \\ at the end of every line. In Spacemacs I can easily tell it to put a \\ at the end of every line. However, maybe I could have done the same thing in the other editors, but I have never checked.

Thanks again for the welcome,
Calum

[Pangur]

Welcome to the forum,

you said you used memoir and ConTeXt and KOMA-script. Users usually stay with one, congratulations

I myself use vim for any texts i need to write. Also using Linux, currently a simple Ubuntu.

I tried LaTeX and found it pleasant enough. I then tried ConTeXt as it seemed to present a less verbose approach to commands. However, I am one of those folk for whom the grass is always greener in the alternative approach. At least I always want to find out if it is. So, I went back to LaTeX and resolved to use Memoir mainly. Komascript offers a different approach, and I am just getting my teeth into over the last week or so.

I suppose I am attracted to the emacsy way of things due to having (back in the day) used a program called Protext under and operating system cpm, which ran on the old Amstrad machines. This would have been in the 1980s, I reckon.

Vim I like too, but am not very proficient in it. However, I find it intriguing, and Spacemacs gives me access to Vim type key-bindings, which allow me to switch from Emacs to Vim and back very easily. A lot of it is what you encounter first, and what your fingers have memorised.

I should have said that ConTeXt was quite good, but there seemed to be little activity in Context Garden, their homepage.

Cheers,
Calum