New Members ⇒ Hello from the Texas panhandle

[SiemensGeek]

I am brand new to LaTeX. My introduction was the featured book "LaTeX Beginner's Guide". I have heard of LaTeX forever but have managed to ignore it up until now. I have always gotten by using Microsoft Word and really didn't see a need for LaTeX. Now that I have found it I don't know how I got by without it. I balance rotating equipment for a living and I use Python to write programs to support my work. Automatically generating a nice looking report from a program has always been a problem. Using COM to automate Word is a pain, especially if want data in tables. Using LaTeX has proven to be a breeze.

I'm glad I found this Forum also. It has already helped to solve one problem and it looks like a treasure trove of information.

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome here within our little community.

LaTeX is used all over the world to generate nice looking automated output, for those of us not really satisfied with plain ascii information

Package pgfplotstable is a great package to read in tabular material and typeset it in a nice looking table. Even some calculations are possible. On the other hand, if you want to graphcally represent your data, use package pgfplots to get very nice and customizable diagrams.

[SiemensGeek]

Thanks
I scanned the manuals for pgfplotstabel and pgfplots. I see some real possibilities for pgfplotstable.

I am currently using Matplotlib to generate plots in Pyhon and it has the ability to output to TeX. I did see that pgfplots supports polar axis so it may have some application too.

One of my frustrations with LaTeX so far is the vast quantity of packages that exists. You can do some great stuff with LaTeX but half the problem is finding the right package. Also documentation is a problem for some of the packages. This certainly is not a problem for pgfplotstable or pgfplots since both of these have extensive documentation.

[Johannes_B]

One of my frustrations with LaTeX so far is the vast quantity of packages that exists. You can do some great stuff with LaTeX but half the problem is finding the right package. Also documentation is a problem for some of the packages. This certainly is not a problem for pgfplotstable or pgfplots since both of these have extensive documentation.

Agreed, it takes some time to get to grips with all that stuff. For starters, it might be best to drop a short question in a forum and ask for advice. There are at least three different packages for headers and footers out there, for example.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Welcome to the forum!

I'm glad that you like the book. I'm currently writing another one, in the approach of a cookbook, like a collection of LaTeX recipes / solutions for many purposes. It might be published in September this year.

Stefan