Leslie Lamport’s research in the field of distributed systems is legendary and his paper “ Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” is seminal. Think of TeX as a mark-up language for typesetting that preceded HTML by some 12 years. Knuth became so frustrated with the state of electronic publishing that he created a typesetting language called TeX in 1978. His The Art of Computer Programming laid the foundation for much of the field of computer science and the study of algorithms.
Knuth, while working on a book about compilers, decided he couldn’t do it without first developing a fundamental theory for computer programming. Sidenote: Leslie Lamport (developer of LaTeX) and Donald Knuth (creator of TeX) are two of the absolute giants in the field of computer science.
#Texshop latex how to#
I like to describe LaTeX as a markup language for print or a way to describe how to typeset a document.
#Texshop latex manual#
It does this but it uses a computer and so requires less manual labour. LaTeX is to a book what a set of blueprints is to a building. One of the best questions I ever saw posted to the TeX forum was: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma? It’s pronounced “lay tech,” short for Lamport TeX after it’s founder Leslie Lamport, and is a based on the TeX typesetting system designed by Donald Knuth. If people who know InDesign didn’t want to try it, how would I likely fare? I thought I was going to have to find a designer online with experience in books.Ī couple days after I thought I’d reached this fork in the road, I remembered a typesetting program I once used for an academic paper called LaTeX. And they knew InDesign!Īt this point I realized I was doing the right thing looking for help. None of them had ever done a book before and they wouldn't bite. I asked a couple friends who have done professional magazine layout if I could pay them to do a book design. With a program designed for layout, you have tools at your disposal for communicating that you simply don’t have or don’t have in the same way with text editors like Microsoft Word.Īfter a couple weeks I became frustrated because I found myself not being able to do what I wanted with it and I was focusing more on learning InDesign than making progress. You want elements such as headers, sub-headers, lists, tables, sidebars, and footnotes that complement the work without your readers being distracted. You want the layout to complement the content.If you have any graphics you want to include, you will struggle integrating them using Microsoft Word. Word and other text editors are not designed for advanced typesetting features like kerning, ligatures, and justification and hyphenation algorithms. Here's a few of the reasons why you want to use a layout program:
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