Best book to learn LaTex?

[Cat]

Why would you want to have to do all the formatting yourself instead of letting a program like InDesign do it for you?

Well, with minimal effort, LaTeX does it all for you: you tell it what something is (a quote, a formula, a section etc.) an it typesets it all. Ideal for amateurs and beginners.
However, if you decide that you want some fancy headers positioned exactly 2.3 inches from the top and want a margin of 3.2 inches on the inner side and 3 inches on the outer side, you can do that. You can completely and utterly reformat the whole page setup to suit any combination of papersize and layout ever used since the Gütenberg bible. With margin notes, footnotes in footnotes, several mixed but correctly hyphenated languages, including ancient greek, etc. etc. etc.

There isn't anything in the world of print that you cannot do with LaTeX if you really want to. It has been even adapted to generate HTML or make dynamic slides, although those are obviously not its primary purposes.

There is an unbelievable wealth of packages out there that enable you to use the most weird and advanced functions. E.g. Xe(La)TeX lets you use your native OS X fonts (any and all) and you can write it all in Unicode (without fancy code like \"u, but ü directly).

Check out Chevy's LaTeX Examples, as they are very good.

[Durbrow]

Cat: In addition to outputing as pdf, postscript, and html isn't there an option to output as hypertext or even wiki? Also, what do you mean by dynamic slides? Can I do this in TeXShop?

Sorry if I am making you repeat yourself. Thanks.

[Cat]

LaTex, being a markup language, can easily be converted to other markup languages, such as HTML. All you need is the latex2html perl script (via CPAN) or Hevea or Tex4ht (both via Fink). You can run these by hand from the terminal or AFAIK you can make a macro/script to use directly from TeXShop (see TeXShop docs on how to write your own macros).

To make slides with dynamic effects (moving text etc.) or otehr kinds of static overhead foils/transparants you can check out packages like ifmslide, pdfslide, texpower and/or ppower4, all available through Fink.

Again, this is not the intended use for (La)TeX, so YMMV. It's not all that easy, if you are new to LaTeX just start by making simple documents with the default layout. If you want to play with advanced options, by all means, try them out, but do not expect fantastic results from your first trials.

What exactly do you mean by wiki output? The content of Wiki's is just plain text with special markup for the links and limited use of other basic markup. You can surely write a (perl)script to convert LaTeX to something like that. If you want to generate the entire (X)HTML code underlying a wiki webpage, that's obviously impossible, as wiki's are based on PHP and MySQL.

[Natobasso]

I have one question. How do they survive selling such a powerful program for free? These programs go for $400-1000 easily. It's amazing all that's free.

[Cat]

Like lots of free software it all began as a small project to solve one single problem for one single user. It was very good, so others started to use it and improve on it. Knuth laid the basics of TeX, then Lamport improved it with some macro's turning it into LaTeX etc. etc. Now it is used far and wide, because of its extraordinary typesetting of mathematical formulae and all kinds of traditional typesetting tricks (from ligatures to grey-ratio to automatic numbering and referencing etc.). Then plug-ins were developed, again to solve specific problems or to enhance a specific feature, like BibTeX for bibliographies. It is a collection of hobby tools which have become a professional instrument and is now also being maintained by professionals who simply do this because they also need it themselves.

However, while the programs and packages are all free, the books (LaTeX companion etc.) are _very_ expensive ...

[Durbrow]

I want to add three comments to Cat's remarks. First, TeXShop has improved and become easier to use. For example, there is now a Table Maker GUI that is quite useful. Second, another advantage of LaTex for long documents, I think, is that it is much faster to find and replace text in the original text document compared to word-processors. Lastly, where LaTeX is lacking is in templates (classes) for other publications such as American Psychological Association. This, for me, seems a weak spot.

P.S. OmniOutliner, with several AppleScripts, can be useful to make initial TeX drafts.