[XeTeX] The apprentice's response

Andres Conrado Montoya andresconrado at gmail.com
Sat Apr 18 03:09:13 CEST 2009


Hello there!!
I wanna thank you all for your kindness. I think I know where to start.

Steps (6 so far):
1. Learn LaTeX (Read a book, maybe "Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly,
Guide to LaTeX"). Other documentation: lshort.pdf, for example.
Wikibooks version included. Some more in the web and my distro, now I
know how to find them: texdoc <package>.
  1.2. Once learned, Include things like memoir, special attributes
for handling pdf bleed/trim/slug and specs, etc.
2. Once handled, take XeLaTeX.
  2.1. Include things like fontspec. By the time you arrived here, you
mostly will know what do you need and where to find it. And there is
the list ;)
3. On doubt, go to 1. And the list.
4. Compose beautiful books! :)
5. go ahead and mess wit XeTeX and TeX!
6. Compose more beautiful books! again and again!

For those of you who asked, I have no principal interest in the
mathematics part of LaTeX, but REALLY have interest in the
unicode/font support in XeLaTeX, because I work for a humanities
faculty: http://www.humanas.unal.edu.co/cms.php?id=731 (sorry, there
is pretty much nothing about our projects, I posted them in my blog,
see my signature. The sites are in spanish, sorry) and have to manage
greek text, for example. Sometimes arabic, or hebrew. There is no
efficient way of manage oriental languages in InDesign, for example,
without buying special copies. And the software itself is pretty
expensive. And I've seen things like the page of Dario Tarbonelli
about LaTeX (http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex) and the showcase of
tsengbooks (http://www.tsengbooks.com/), and think "hey, if this can
be done with LaTeX/XeTeX, my books can be done too, just need to learn
it".

I really want to remove the plague of propietary software in my design
work. The prices are abusive, and the changes from versions
unpredictable, machine demanding and pretty much bloated with useless
stuff. I know very well the qualities of Adobe's soft, but for the
things that I've been seeing, firmly believe that the same qualities
can be archieved with software libre (free as in speech).

So far, so good. I have been tried Scribus, and found it promising.
But I think is basic, and unstable (the stable version have a many
less design resources than the development version), and cannot use
extendend open type properties, for example. But XeLaTeX can, and can
do it very well, for the info I've seen. This is a very good
beginning, the time is good, and I think I will walk.

Thank you so much for your time and responses.
-- 
Andrés Conrado Montoya
El Andi
andresconrado at gmail.com
http://chiquitico.org
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Los fines no justifican los medios, porque la medida verdadera de
nuestro carácter está dada por los medios que estamos dispuestos a
utilizar, no por los fines que proclamamos.
----------------------------------------
Por favor, evite enviarme documentos adjuntos en formato Word o PowerPoint.
Lea http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.es.html


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