[XeTeX] The apprentice's response

Yue Wang yuleopen at gmail.com
Sat Apr 18 12:02:37 CEST 2009


book design is much harder to learn than LaTeX.

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Andres Conrado Montoya
<andresconrado at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
> ----------------------------------------
> 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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