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<p>i just subscribed to <i>texhax</i>, too. It's also not clear to
me what <i>tex-live</i> actually is in comparison to LaTeX. The
former is a library collection and the latter is a format, right?
And <i>texhax</i> is about how to use LaTeX and <i>tex-live</i>,
right?<br>
</p>
<p>Your suggested Tug.org is far not as inviting as Learnlatex.org,
especially for beginners. The design of Tug.org is like from
previous century only without animated GIF-files and queer colors
and i really can't find where there's a starter manual. There are
many links without a clearly structured design. This is also a
good example why i avoid some documentation because they just
aren't written or compiled the way i'd like them.</p>
<p>Thanks for the suggestion to read a paper-book regarding to
getting away from the computer screen! Is reading from a paper
anyhow better nowadays as reading from the screen? In addition: i
can't do permanent annotations if it's not my exemplar, i can't
discuss with the author, searching functionality of a paper-book
is relatively slow as it bases on the index at the end and that
might not contain the particular string i want to search for, i
can't copy a paragraph, i can't share the book itself with someone
in another location, i don't see animations inside a paper-book,
there are no links in a paper-book and if there are then i had to
type them in, paper-books can't be updated, errata has to be
printed separately for the next release if at all. i've only found
one good use for a paper-book and that's also only regarding to a
manual of chemistry and physics as it contains thousands of pages
and it's not well-enough structured which makes me scroll and
scrolling such a thick book is a nightmare in comparison to
turning paper pages.</p>
<p>Yes, for PDF-files LaTeX seems to be unavoidable. Or not. I'm
confused. Is LaTeX unavoidable or is XeTeX unavoidable as i don't
use LaTeX, i use XeTeX or is XeTeX kind of LaTeX, too? Maybe i'm
asking too many questions. i should really start reading the
manual however i can only start doing it next month.</p>
<p>i use <i>bookdown</i> because i haven't found a better
alternative for that. It uses <i>pandoc</i> and <i>pandoc</i>
uses real LaTeX and has the template ready to use for the five
output categories (<i>documentclass</i>) LaTeX offers. Sometimes,
i want to do something directly in LaTeX, for instance write
equations or tell where two columns start or one column starts. <i>bookdown</i>
makes it possible to write once and have output either for web or
print. Should i write directly in LaTeX using for instance <i>TeXstudio</i>,
i have no idea how could i write R blocks inside a LaTeX <i>document</i>
and i can't generate a website out of my content as no web browser
natively reads LaTeX, they only read HTML, ECMAScript and CSS
natively. For writing web software, i use <i>eclipse</i> as IDE.
After a quick search, i found <a
href="http://eclipse-latex.sourceforge.net/index.php?target=3">LaPsE</a>
which seems to be promising however no idea whether it handles R.
So i mainly write in R markdown, put some R code chunks in between
and use some <i>TeX</i> chunks for equations. If i'd write a web
software with PHP, i'd not write spaghetti however that spaghetti
of R markdown is pretty tasty. What it lacks is a JIT-compiler as
there's even for Java. For larger files, i have to wait a lot
before i see what i just produced or in order to test something.
In that sense, LaTeX-producing is like video-producing - it takes
time and isn't still optimized like PHP or web browsers. As for
web, every page can be loaded separately, parts on a page can be
loaded only if needed. As for PDF, everything will be loaded at
once. And i only need PDF-files that i can create in LaTeX for
some university reports and my thesis as some people like to have
them printed which isn't so bad considering hypothesis that one
day, we'll have a blackout and then we could still read
paper-books. For posters, writing directly in LaTeX doesn't seem
to be feasible as graphical interfaces do the work much more
efficiently. i use <i>scribus</i> for them which isn't a good
software at all but there's no better FOSS in this branch. Why
should i use LaTeX, for instance <i>tikz</i> for creating a logo
or vector graphics at all if there's SVG that extends XML?</p>
<p>For new questions that aren't directly related to <i>tex-live</i>,
i'll use <i>texhax</i>. Regarding to Chinese characters with <i>bookdown</i>,
they couldn't probably recommend anything if they aren't <i>bookdown</i>
experts and i don't want to modify <i>default.latex</i> at least
not before i really know what i'm doing.</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26.07.22 02:11, Reinhard Kotucha
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:25311.8974.648534.840340@gargle.gargle.HOWL">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On 2022-07-25 at 21:56:19 +0300, peacecop kalmer: wrote:
> Participating in this mailing list has already been useful.
Sure, but for general questions about TeX and LaTeX the TeXhax mailing
list is a more appropriate place:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texhax">https://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/texhax</a>
You'll certainly get more help there.
The TeX Live mailing list is only for problems with the TeX Live
distribution (installation problems, license issues, etc).
> In addition to the reasoning behind licensing, i now know the site
> Learnlatex.org that wasn't known to me before.
I didn't know Learnlatex.org before either, but you'll also find a lot
of documentation at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.tug.org/begin.html">https://www.tug.org/begin.html</a>
There are probably a lot of books about LaTeX in your local library,
especially if it's close to a university. This might be quite helpful
if you don't want to spend the rest of your life in front of a
computer screen.
If you want to create reasonable PDF files, learning LaTeX is
unavoidable. It's not as difficult as it looks at a first glance.
> And if i use default.latex for /bookdown/ then [...]
I doubt that such a wrapper is helpful if you really want to learn
LaTeX. The input format of such tools is usually completely different
from what's described in books about LaTeX. In my opinion such tools
are not good starting points for beginners at all.
> As for Chinese characters,
> [...]
Chinese could already be typeset with LaTeX even before XeTeX and
LuaTeX were invented.
If you are interested in a solution, start a new thread on TeXhax, not
here (see link above). Prepare a minimal .tex file which can be fed
to xelatex and lualatex and demonstrates the problem.
Regards,
Reinhard
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