The free software communities focused much attention on StarOffice, WordPerfect, AbiWord, KWord, and the like. Meanwhile, most have ignored one of the best-kept secrets in the world of document creation. Though it ships with almost every Linux distribution, and has been around longer than Linux itself, the LaTeX typesetting system remains a hidden gem.
Quite likely the most powerful document creation and management system available, LaTeX (and its underlying typesetting engine, TeX) is favored in academia and is the required format for many scholarly papers. It takes typesetting issues such as line-breaks and inter-character spacing very seriously, and it arguably has no peer in the task of formatting complex math equations. It's been ported to just about every major platform and a bunch of minor ones.
So why isn't LaTeX right up there with all the other word processors? Well, if you think that Linux has a problem with user-friendliness, wait until you try LaTeX. Calling LaTeX "esoteric" is a bit of understatement.
Let's start with the name. It's "LaTeX"; the capital T and X are deliberate, and in fact the whole word is meant to be a ligature, such as æ (which can be produced easily in the body text of a LaTeX document, of course). Even the pronunciation isn't what you'd expect; newbies pronounce it like the material that surgical gloves are made of; those in the know say "LAH-tek".
Then there's the way you run it. Like a C language program, LaTeX documents are created with your favorite text editor, looking a bit like raw HTML or WordPerfect documents in Reveal Codes mode. These files, when complete, are then run through a processor to create formatted output. The resulting "dvi" (device independent) binary file can be easily churned into PostScript, or PDF files, or X Window displays, or many other printer and typsetting machine formats.
Have I scared you off yet? If not, there's more. To really grasp the power of the LaTeX typesetting system, as well as the TeX engine underneath it, and all the other components associated with LaTeX and TeX, you pretty well need to immerse yourself, and that's not easy.
LaTeX documentation comes as a melange of detailed but bland reference manuals, and tutorials that are well-meaning yet overwhelm most first-timers with too much information about LaTeX's innards. The LaTeX Companion book is chock-full of information, but it assumes that you're already knee-deep in the product. The book's friendly cover drawing of a St. Bernard hides the fact that his keg contains not brandy, but instructions for building the still. And as full of useful stuff as it is, if it were any drier it would have a cactus growing out of it. In terms of user-friendliness, LaTeX is where Linux was half a dozen years ago.
So much for the bad news. For all the headaches I've described above, LaTeX can be worth mastering. It's well integrated with the Web, PostScript, and XML. The distribution used with most Linux systems, teTeX, is complete and well laid out. And while it's one of the largest packages on a typical Linux distro, it still weighs in far lighter than WordPerfect or most other word processors.
The good news is that LaTeX, like Linux, is itself getting a friendly face. In LaTeX, as in Linux, the addition of the GUI is an enhancement and complement to, not a replacement for, the traditional way of doing things.
The key here is LyX, a GUI front end that makes LaTeX look and work like a word processor. LyX has two versions -- the original generic X Window version, and KLyX which is optimized for the KDE desktop. Indeed, LyX doesn't call itself WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) as much as WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean). According to KLyX developer Matthias Ettrich, KLyX will eventually go away as future versions of LyX will provide front ends for KDE2, GNOME and other desktops.
Finally, to make up for the difficulty of following the documentation, there's a significant user community eager to help: the TeX Users Group has many useful publications, self-help forums, and downloads. While it's far from what I'd call the perfect tutorial, try this introduction (a large PDF file) as a starting point. Then have a look at LyX, and you're on your way.
If you're really into documents, you'll soon come to appreciate LaTeK's acquired taste.
How do you process your documents? Tell Evan in the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.Without a major Linux kernel release, user-friendliness and word processing made some of the best news in the open source world last year.
The free software communities focused much attention on StarOffice, WordPerfect, AbiWord, KWord, and the like. Meanwhile, most have ignored one of the best-kept secrets in the world of document creation. Though it ships with almost every Linux distribution, and has been around longer than Linux itself, the LaTeX typesetting system remains a hidden gem.
Quite likely the most powerful document creation and management system available, LaTeX (and its underlying typesetting engine, TeX) is favored in academia and is the required format for many scholarly papers. It takes typesetting issues such as line-breaks and inter-character spacing very seriously, and it arguably has no peer in the task of formatting complex math equations. It's been ported to just about every major platform and a bunch of minor ones.
So why isn't LaTeX right up there with all the other word processors? Well, if you think that Linux has a problem with user-friendliness, wait until you try LaTeX. Calling LaTeX "esoteric" is a bit of understatement.
Let's start with the name. It's "LaTeX"; the capital T and X are deliberate, and in fact the whole word is meant to be a ligature, such as æ (which can be produced easily in the body text of a LaTeX document, of course). Even the pronunciation isn't what you'd expect; newbies pronounce it like the material that surgical gloves are made of; those in the know say "LAH-tek".
Then there's the way you run it. Like a C language program, LaTeX documents are created with your favorite text editor, looking a bit like raw HTML or WordPerfect documents in Reveal Codes mode. These files, when complete, are then run through a processor to create formatted output. The resulting "dvi" (device independent) binary file can be easily churned into PostScript, or PDF files, or X Window displays, or many other printer and typsetting machine formats.
Have I scared you off yet? If not, there's more. To really grasp the power of the LaTeX typesetting system, as well as the TeX engine underneath it, and all the other components associated with LaTeX and TeX, you pretty well need to immerse yourself, and that's not easy.
LaTeX documentation comes as a melange of detailed but bland reference manuals, and tutorials that are well-meaning yet overwhelm most first-timers with too much information about LaTeX's innards. The LaTeX Companion book is chock-full of information, but it assumes that you're already knee-deep in the product. The book's friendly cover drawing of a St. Bernard hides the fact that his keg contains not brandy, but instructions for building the still. And as full of useful stuff as it is, if it were any drier it would have a cactus growing out of it. In terms of user-friendliness, LaTeX is where Linux was half a dozen years ago.
So much for the bad news. For all the headaches I've described above, LaTeX can be worth mastering. It's well integrated with the Web, PostScript, and XML. The distribution used with most Linux systems, teTeX, is complete and well laid out. And while it's one of the largest packages on a typical Linux distro, it still weighs in far lighter than WordPerfect or most other word processors.
The good news is that LaTeX, like Linux, is itself getting a friendly face. In LaTeX, as in Linux, the addition of the GUI is an enhancement and complement to, not a replacement for, the traditional way of doing things.
The key here is LyX, a GUI front end that makes LaTeX look and work like a word processor. LyX has two versions -- the original generic X Window version, and KLyX which is optimized for the KDE desktop. Indeed, LyX doesn't call itself WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) as much as WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean). According to KLyX developer Matthias Ettrich, KLyX will eventually go away as future versions of LyX will provide front ends for KDE2, GNOME and other desktops.
Finally, to make up for the difficulty of following the documentation, there's a significant user community eager to help: the TeX Users Group has many useful publications, self-help forums, and downloads. While it's far from what I'd call the perfect tutorial, try this introduction (a large PDF file) as a starting point. Then have a look at LyX, and you're on your way.
If you're really into documents, you'll soon come to appreciate LaTeX's acquired taste.
How do you process your documents? Tell Evan in the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.
