New Members ⇒ Greetings From Jason!

[jbend8]

Hello,

I just downloaded the ProTex "suite" (so-to-speak) for Vista, and here's why:

I've been working on a non-fiction book over the past year, and wanted to a to get a decent-looking typeset copy (since people associate looks with feel/content) to send out to get feedback before pursuing any sort of publishing. Didn't want to pay the big bucks for it, had a bit of experience with LaTeX, and figured it would be more fun and rewarding to do it myself.

My experience with LaTeX has been limited only to required use for calculus homeworks in college (I'm sure some of you have been there ).

Needless to say, I'm probably going to need a lot of help with this. I'll try and do my best with searching the forum as not to bother with repeat questions...but looking forward to everyone's input/help.

Cheers!
Jason

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Jason,

welcome to the forum!

That's a very good reason for working with LaTeX. I can confirm that the look of a book is important. Once I wrote a book and got a bad review on Amazon by somebody just complaining about a design desicion of the publisher and he concluded then the book has to be bad. As it was written, the "reviewer" did not read the book.

In detail, I wrote a book about LaTeX, but the publisher insisted on using InDesign for the layout. He even refused to use my PDF images and used bitmap versions instead. I could not stop them since the contract was signed long before. Then people said, a book about LaTeX cannot be good if it's not published using LaTeX (even if I used it for writing). So much for judging the content just because of the look. Well, I don't care about the loss of the ignorant publisher. I did not write for money.

Stefan

[cgnieder]

Hi Jason,

Welcome to the LaTeX community!

I [...] wanted to a to get a decent-looking typeset copy [...] and figured it would be more fun and rewarding to do it myself.

I like that reason I hope you'll have as much fun as sounds like!

Best regards