New Members ⇒ Hello from Bob

[BSchor]

I am following a Long and Winding Road to LaTeX. In the 70's, when I was using Runoff on a PDP-11, I came across Don Knuth's book "TeX and MetaFont", and was entranced. However, I did not have access to a system that would allow me to use/try it out, and Runoff was "good enough".

I gradually migrated to PCs, and MicroSoft Word, where I became a local guru on using features (like Styles) to handle basic formatting for you. Every time a big grant would go out, with the need to "look pretty" and have figures and tables in the right place, with little or no wasted space (since there were strict page/font limits), I often had to "work magic".

As Word evolved, however, it because more "user-friendly", which seems to mean "feature-opaque" -- things that were up-front and obvious in Office 2000 and 2003 are now well hidden.

So when my junior-in-college son asked me at Thanksgiving break "Dad, have you ever heard of LaTeX?", I said "Yes -- why do you ask?". I got a 5-minute introduction to the fact that LaTeX is (a) still around, (b) still very useful and vital, and (c) preferred by a community of interesting people that include my children.

I immediately went on the Web, found the MiKTeX distribution, and starting playing/learning. I've written up a lecture on "Introduction to LabVIEW" (learning about inserting Figures and Tables, and creating simple commands to insert text-formatted-the-way-I-want), and am now at work on a technical report for a redesign of some software we use to design experiments in sound localization (and learning about inserting equations and math).

I'm not ready to give Word up entirely, but I can certainly see that I'm likely to do more with LaTeX as I learn more!

[cgnieder]

Hi Bob!

Welcome to the LaTeX community! I hope you'll soon be enjoying LaTeX as much as most of us do

Best

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Bob,

welcome to the board!
Very interesting background, nice to read about that.

Stefan