[texhax] Do any college courses exist in TeX?

[Schneider]

John:

Bob is right.  There are lots of commands and lots of packages with
hundreds of commands.  I never learned TeX because LaTeX does the job
for me and it is powerful enough.  Most of the time the details of
typesetting will be handled perfectly well by LaTeX.  So I would
recommend installing the latest TeX package, including LaTex.

Then start with a VERY simple example and get it to typeset.  I made a
demo at:

http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/latexdemo/

Once you have a tiny example going, you can build on it.  When I want
to do something new, a few googles will usually lead me to information
about how to do it but if that doesn't work, folks on texhax and other
resources can help you.

I've collected interesting and useful links at:

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

You can use an interface like texshop but I prefer to just edit the
.tex files directly in vim.  I've programmed vim to accept ',' to mean
':w[control-M]' so a single comma writes the file out.  Then in
another terminal I have my atchange program running set up to typeset
that .tex file and display the result with the skim PDF viewer on a
Mac.  This way I can edit the .tex file and try things without using
the mouse at all and it makes experimentation easy.

Bottom line:  One small step at a time!

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
  http://schneider.ncifcrf.gov (current link)
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent link)