[texhax] Do any college courses exist in TeX?
Henry Law
news at lawshouse.org
Tue Jun 23 10:53:55 CEST 2015
On 22/06/15 20:58, resolvent at comcast.net wrote:
> we can never organize & memorize the massive number of commands
John, I sympathise with your analysis of the problem: memorising all the
commands is hard. That's true of a huge number of languages, though:
most programmers use only a subset of the structures that their language
provides. It's a bit like a painter: there are hundreds of different
pigments available, but as she practices and gets experience a painter
will settle on quite a small pallette of "her" colours, the ones that
enable her to do what she wants. And then, occasionally, when she has a
need for something specific (flower painters have this problem) she'll
go to the catalogue, or the artists' store, and get it.
So it is with Tex; if you start with a simple document that someone else
wrote, with just headings, paragraphs, bullet points, a bit of
emphasising and maybe a mathematical formula and an image, and then
bodge that around, modifying bits and repeating bits, you'll find that
the amount of Tex or LaTeX that you need to /remember/ is very small,
and the rest you can look up.
Keep a window open to whatever reference suits your way of thinking (I'm
a LaTeX user and I personally like
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/latex/ltx-2.html ) and alt-tab to it when
you need to. Don't forget that you can open different bits of your
reference in tabs in the same browser window, a bit like when you have a
couple of fingers in the pages of a (paper) book you're reading.
Good luck; and don't forget to ask here if you get stuck. We (at least
I) like to help!
--
Henry Law Manchester, England
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