[texhax] Introductory examples

Schneider schneidt at mail.nih.gov
Fri Jul 31 11:50:16 CEST 2015


Albrecht:

> Dear Thomas,
> 
> thank you very much for your reply. I just had a look at your first
> link and would like to comment on it.

I'm bringing the discussion back to texhax; hope you don't mind.

> Am 29.07.2015 um 23:21 schrieb Schneider:
> >Albrecht:
> >
> >To respond to "word is 'so much easier'", see this graph:
> >http://www.pinteric.com/miktex.html
> 
> I found the first paragraphs of your introduction very helpful and
> will surely include them in my 'advertising'.
> 
> The practical way to L. you describe is much too complicated, it
> seems - pardon my frankness - a bit outdated. No one uses dvi
> anymore, pdf being a possible choice. Please have a look to the DVD
> Texlive which you can find on the tug internet page. Therein is a
> part called ProText. This allows to install a complete T.-system on
> windows computers by simply starting the process and indicating
> one's own wishes. No need to look for various programs ...
> everything is on this dvd and will be included automatically.

Sorry I was not clear.  That pinteric.com page was not written by me. 
The only item I was referring to was the figure and I should have been
more clear about that.  I avoid windows and microsoft entirely.

My page is:

http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/latex.html

I DO use dvi as an intermediate step - my script 'l' converts from
LaTeX to dvi, then to postscript and then to pdf and I use the pdf
with the skim reader on a mac because it automatically refreshes
pages.  (Adobe  refused to make their program able to do this.)  There
is a way to use LaTeX to get pdfs directly, but unfortunately it will
not accept postscript figures and I have built all my papers using
postscript figures.  I don't want to have to convert everything
(including done and finished papers) to postscript.  Fortunately these
processes are fast and automatic.

As for GUI interfaces - I find them extremely slow to manipulate and
highly awkward.  I prefer to edit in a fast editor (vim) and trigger
the typesetting scripts by writing out the file with one character (ie
the comma ',' mapped to ':w<control-M>') and using atchange
(http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/atchange.html) to react to the newly
written file and start the typesetting.

> It would be fine to get a comment to this procedure from you.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> A. Mehl
> -- 
> Albrecht Mehl	
> Veilchenweg 7       |Tel. (06151) 37 39 92
> 64291 Darmstadt, Germany|sehenswert - ungefähr 'Wir einsam im All'
>  http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/index.html

"This page shows a scale model of the solar system, ..."
Interesting but hard to find the planets (I know that is the point) -
would be nice to add a distance scale on the bottom so things were not
entirely black.

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Center for Cancer Research
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  schneidt at mail.nih.gov
  http://schneider.ncifcrf.gov (current link)
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent link)


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