New Members ⇒ long-time OOo user learning latex

[jamtat]

Hi. I'm a long-time OOo user who's re-investigating latex. I had wanted to use latex to write my dissertation starting about 9 years ago but, being a fairly new Linux user at that time, I decided it would be too much of a challenge. I ended up writing the thing using OOWriter, and keeping that really complex document behaving in a sane manner proved quite a challenge. At the time I started using OOWriter, for example, that program would not do page-spanning table columns, and I had about 80 pages of page-spanning column in one of my appendices (it was two texts in parallel, and a table seemed about the only way to accomplish this in OOo). I used some horrifying kludges to make that section appear as I wanted it to. In any case, with the proper incantations and supplications I was finally able to appease the document into sanity long enough to print, submit, then revise it.

Bottom line on that is that I became fairly proficient in OOo. But I always wished I had had, and taken, the time, to learn latex. So, I'm giving it a go now.

No particular writing projects urgently calling at the moment. I've taken my experimentation with latexc quite a bit further these past couple of days, but have plenty of questions. I'm glad I found this board and should be posting some initial inquiries soon.

Thanks for reading,
James

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi James,

welcome to the board!
It's a very good decision to try out LaTeX.

Stefan

[localghost]

Once you have successfully done your first documents with LaTeX, you won't miss word processors like OOo.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten