New Members ⇒ Former Framemaker user

[mikkelstuff]

I'm an old graduate engineer who's been at this from CDC mainframes to linux and Macs, and long before word processing was taken over by Microsoft, barf, WORD. Alas Adobe has largely given up on my much beloved Framemaker, PowerPC Macs are dying away, and I've been searching and searching for a decent word processor.

So I'm learning Latex from the book "The Latex Companion" and am slowly making progress. My only real complaint is too many cooks, too many ways to accomplish the same thing, and too many mysteries in the process. On the other hand, Latex can really do the math and do it well. In that regard, I've never had it so good.

Any chance someone out there offers say a 3-5 day short course on Latex? I'd get credit for the course and time away to learn without the usual panic.

[josephwright]

Any chance someone out there offers say a 3-5 day short course on Latex? I'd get credit for the course and time away to learn without the usual panic.

It might be helpful to tell us where you are!

[Montag]

So I'm learning Latex from the book "The Latex Companion" and am slowly making progress.

You are really making progress with that book? Well, I can tell you I am still bitter that I bought it. Buying a book about software, that I will never do again. Especially for something like LaTeX which you can learn by simply searching for stuff online. There are only so many sites that have the right accumulated amount of content. Some sties worth to check out: this starter page or this topic.

[meho_r]

For me, "The LaTeX Companion" is worth every cent. Although it's probably not the best choice for making first steps in LaTeX world ("Guide to LaTeX" may be more suitable for that), it's, IMHO, definitely a must-have for serious LaTeXing.

[Montag]

Well, each to his own (if that's a good idiom), right. It really is a great book, but most of the time it seems pointless to me to read up on anything in it, as most of the relevant info is online. I'm not really bitter, I have to admir, I was just a bit angry with myself because I should have anticipated that for me, buying a book for software wasn't an additional benefit.

[localghost]

[…] My only real complaint is too many cooks, too many ways to accomplish the same thing, and too many mysteries in the process. On the other hand, Latex can really do the math and do it well. In that regard, I've never had it so good. […]

A very common phenomenon where a big community is working towards on goal. But with LaTeX you've done a good choice for document preparation. You will only have to get used to a completely different working process.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten