[Tugindia] Macro ?

[Radhakrishnan CV]

>>>>> "Vijay" == Vijay Kumar <rai_vijay at lycos.com> writes:

[...]

    Vijay> Well, now I am again in a problem and don't know who
    Vijay> to solve it, as I am not much aware of the internal working
    Vijay> of the LaTeX but I can work on it. When it comes to create
    Vijay> your own .sty then it is a problem and also have less
    Vijay> knowledge of Marcos. Is there any thing by which I can come
    Vijay> tp know, who to create your own packages like article,
    Vijay> book, report etc. If I want to use some of the features of
    Vijay> the one style and some from other then what should I do.

Writing a LaTeX class or a package from scratch is not a good idea
although one can venture it if one is brave enough. Usually what TeX
programmers adopt is to take a class from TeX distribution (like
article.cls, report.cls etc) and modify/customize it to suit their
requirements.  For both, one need a thorough knowledge of TeX language
(remember, it is a text formatting language, hence you have to go
through the learning curve of a language), its primitives, data types,
category codes, input reading mechanism, output routines, etc and the
vast library of macros provided by LaTeX. Sadly enough, not much
resources that can be termed as 'user friendly' are available around.

The only ones available are Knuth's TeXBook (the most helpful in all
situations, although terse at times) and Goossens et al: LaTeX
Companion (provides useful hooks and tips). As a startup document, you
must go through the clsguide.tex which is part of any standard LaTeX
distribution.

You need not get disheartened though, you can bravely go through any
one of the classes distributed with TeX, start hacking, experimenting,
soon you'll discover that you've arrived at a new class. Be warned, it
might be tormenting at the start, but soon you will find it
interesting.

Radhakrishnan