[OS X TeX] Students could use some help

[Jeffrey J Weimer]

On Apr 9, 2007, at 11:10 PM, Alan Munn wrote:

> At 8:39 PM -0500 4/9/07, Jeffrey J Weimer wrote:
>> On Apr 9, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Daniel Culver wrote:
>>
>>> I am trying to help some high school students use gwtex with  
>>> Texshop 2.10 beta to...

>> Find a copy of "A Guide to LaTeX 2e" from Kopka and Daly. IMO, it  
>> is a much better companion for doing LaTeX than the companion.
>
> I agree completely.  For beginning to learn LaTeX it's a really  
> great book.  The LaTeX Companion is a good reference once you know  
> the basics.
>
>> ...
>> Try the code below, documented so your students might see what the  
>> commands are telling LaTeX to do ...
>
> I agree with this in principle, but I prefer to give students a  
> template that includes the basic packages so that they don't end up  
> doing everything by hand (which ultimately leads to very kludgy and  
> messy documents.)  Since there is almost always a package available  
> to do the most obvious things, and packages are usually much better  
> than any home-cooked code (certainly by beginners) I think that it  
> is important to get students into the mode of thinking that  
> packages will do the work for them.  To this end, I suggest the  
> following modifications to Jeffrey's  basic document:

Thanks! I've learned a lot from your suggested changes, especially  
that it is time for me to update my outdated standard document  
preamble from the OzTeX/MacOS8 days.

--
J. J. Weimer, Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering
University of Alabama in Huntsville, MSB 125, 301 Sparkman Dr
Huntsville, AL 35899                phone: 256-824-6954



------------------------- Helpful Info -------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/
List Reminders & Etiquette: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/list/