Making TeX Work

I'm an O'Reilly & Associates fan; a big fan. I went through my bookcases at home and at work and counted 19 different O'Reilly books that I've purchased with my own hard-earned cash. I refer to them almost daily.

I have one of the major commercial technical publishing packages available to me at work. I have a copy of Microsoft Word for Windows at home. I like their WYSIWYG look and feel and I like their intrinsic (to me at least) ease of use.

I'm admittedly not a big TeX fan at all; and I even participate quite a bit in the Linux DOC Project, which uses LaTeX as its document mark-up language of choice.

OK, call me a Linux heretic.

I was looking at this book as an opportunity to learn about all the little gotchas that just aren't made visible except by oral tradition from guru to wanna-be. Maybe after reading the book and trying some things, I'll be less TeX challenged. Naaaaahhhh...

Making TeX Work is a book that somehow disappoints me. The book follows the normal exceptionally high quality O'Reilly & Associates standards for organization, format, binding, and appearance. There's 469 pages simply chock-full of information regarding TeX and associated utilities. I just never figured out why a generic Linux user needs to buy it.

The Summer 1994 'ora.com' catalog/magazine from O'Reilly & Associates has an article on this book that describes it as “a complete reference to this complex typesetting system”. It also states:

Cool—a book on how to put all the pieces together and make a document happen...

Later in the article, they mention that:

Hey wait a minute. I'm getting this feeling it won't have hands-on examples...

“Making TeX Work guides you through this maze of tools and tells you how you can obtain them...”

Danger Will Robinson! Sounds like a how to find TeX sources FAQ...

The Big Picture describes what TeX is and what its goals are. It describes a little about how TeX formats pages to look nice, about the differences between text formatting, word processing and desktop publishing, and describes the underlying guts of how TeX does its magic. It's ugly in there, kiddies...

Editing briefly describes some of the usual editors that have varying abilities to provide a good environment for writing TeX documents.

This chapter disappointed me somewhat as I was looking for more information regarding exactly how to do something in typical editors. I was hoping that they'd pick an editor (even [ugh...] Emacs) and give some real details regarding how to hook in and use the editor to efficiently write TeX documents.

Running TeX describes how to execute the program and deal with some of the most common errors in the documents.

Macro Packages describes some of the different formats such as TeX, LaTeX, and TeXinfo as well as some of the more obscure special purpose formats such as MusicTeX. While I found them interesting, there is probably nothing here that you can't find out about elsewhere on Usenet.

There were some comments about how to do TeX in color and how to print 'em on a black and white printer that I found rather interesting.

Fonts describes in laborious detail more than any sane person would want to know about font selection and generation. While it's a nice amount of background information, it sure scared the heck out of me, and I'm probably a typical member of the book's target audience.

Pictures and Figures talks a little about the fact that if you try hard enough, you can draw pictures in TeX. It also gives a few examples about how to include external images in your document.

One nice addition is a description of some of the many image generation, viewer, editor, and manipulation programs commonly available such as xv and ImageMagick. People who plan to provide WorldWideWeb pages with embedded graphics might be interested in this chapter even if TeX and friends scare you off.

International Considerations describes the issues (and tools to deal with them) involved in writing nonEnglish documents in TeX.

Printing talks about utilities that generate the appropriate fonts to be able to print what you can preview.

Previewing describes some of the various viewers for MS-Windows, X, DOS (non-Windows), and Unix terminals.

Online Documentation talks about how to make your TeX documentation available online in some of the more common formats such as TeXinfo, HTML, or ASCII.

Introducing METAFONT describes the mechanics of building non-standard fonts. Again, I wonder whether this issue isn't far beyond the probable ability (or interest) of the book's target audience.

Bibliographies, Indexes, and Glossaries talks about how to use BibTeX to automate citations of references into a bibliography and also about many of the utilities available to automate the creation and manipulation of a bibliography database. It also describes how to construct an index and glossary by annotating your TeX documents.