🚀 go-pugleaf

steeve@concour.cs.concordia.ca (HARDY j g steeve):
>> 	Second, I have heard that there is a booklet out there called
>> either,
>> 	A Gentle introduction to LaTeX, or
>> 	A Gentle Introduction to TeX
>> I would appreciate any information on this. What I am looking for really is 
>> a simple and hopefully well written introduction, 

russell@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (David Russell) writes:

>The book I use is
>
>LaTex A document Preparation System User's Guide & Reference.
>By. Leslie Lamport
>Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.  ISBN 0-201-15790-X
>
>It seems to cover all the basics ...

"A Gentle Introduction To TeX" by Michel Doob, though not a substitute
for Knuth's encyclopedic and uniquely authoritaive "TeXbook",
is nevertheless an extremely well written and FREE beginners manual for
Plain TeX. It covers basics of TeX which you should learn no matter which
macro package you use. You can FTP it from many places, one I can recall
offhand is
	lifshitz.ph.utexas.edu
in the directory
	/pub/tex ;
the file is called gentle.tex .

If you are using LaTeX, then of course you should also get the above
mentioned book by Leslie Lamport (the author of LaTeX). It does cover
all the basics, so to speak---but only of the LaTeX macro package,
not of TeX itself. (As one might guess from the mention of Addison-
Wessley there, it is not free.)

One problem with LaTeX is that it is not compatible with Plain TeX. So
whatever you learn, e.g., in the "TeXbook" or in "A Gentle Introduction"
may or may not work with LaTeX.

One Plain-compatible alternative to LaTeX that I know of is a macro
package named TeXsis, written by Eric Myers and Frank Paige. Ignore
their description of it as "a macro package for physicists" which is
a misleading misnomer. You can also get it from lifshitz mentioned
above; unlike LaTeX, it comes with a free manual! For more information
on TeXsis, contact Dr Eric Myers (myers@lifshitz.ph.utexas.edu).

(TeXsis is a large package, however, not the kind that belongs in the
personal directory of each user who likes it. Therefore, if there are
many TeX-users on your system, then I'd suggest that you ask your
system administrator to install it for everyone.)
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