[texhax] could/should I have used TeX/LaTeX? (long post)

[William F. Adams]

Yes, all of that could've been done in LaTeX (or plain, or ConTeXt).

TrueType fonts can be easily installed for use with pdftex or you can 
convert them to Type 1 and use them with pretty much anything.

A good overview of what can be done w/ TeX is the TeX Showcase, 
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase

More examples here:

http://www.atlis.com/services/composition/samples/TeX%20Sample%20Pages/

IME, w/ good markup and well-written macros and reasonably flexible 
specifications, in many cases all that's necessary for final tweaking 
is running the occasional page spread long or short to make things fall 
out nicely.

Off the top of my head, here's a list of packages which would've helped 
in setting this up:

  - booktabs - ``Production Quality Tables''
  - graphicx - (the ability to rotate boxes &c.)
  - ledmac, parallel or paracol - (parallel columns)
  - babel - French, German and other foreign language support

Centering a graphic on a page is trivial in LaTeX....

Getting the line numbers to synch with the graphic would've best been 
done using ps/pdftricks or something along those lines (if you've got 
Adobe Illustrator and can run on Mac OS X, warmreader and the marked 
objects plug-in make this sort of thing trivial and interactive)

Here's a list of free on-line references I put together:

http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-e-tex.html

William


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William Adams, publishing specialist
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