From: JimDiamond@ns.sympatico.ca
On 2023-03-11 at 03:24 AST, Mike Spencer wrote:
>
> Henrik Carlqvist writes:
>
>> On Wed, 08 Mar 2023 01:25:46 -0400, Mike Spencer wrote:
>>
>>> I don't have a word processor. On the very rare occasions that I
>>> need to print a business letter, I compose it in simple HTML and print
>>> from the browser.
>>
>> HTML might work, but if you want really nice letters you should learn
>> latex!
>
> But when I went to my shiny new Linux system a few years later, it had
> Latex or Tetex or something that was a dialect of TEX. I bumbled
> about a bit but never found a tutorial that was simple enough to just,
> yew kno, bang out a nice page. All seemed too much like learning a
> new programming language (yeah, I know what a macro is but...) to
> become a pro compositor.
I find LaTeX to be the ultimate poorly-designed system. It attempts to be
all things to all people, and then falls over its own feet trying to do
that. Because of all the "helpful" packages people have contributed over
time, situations where package A conflicts with package B show up with
disturbing regularity.
(plain) TeX gets a lot of hate from LaTeX people, but if all you want to do
is to bang out a nice page, you may find plain TeX easier to use. By
itself it is pretty low-level, and without writing your own macros you
would end up explicitly changing fonts, explicitly specifying when text is
to be centered, and so on. But if you accept that, the learning curve is
pretty short. If this is of any interest to you, feel free to contact me
directly (that's my real email addr above!) and I might be able to get you
going with plain TeX very quickly. For, at least, banging out one-page
documents.
Cheers.
Jim
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