Re: [seul-edu] Re: perl or......

[Thomas Tempé <ttempe@ifaedi.insa-lyon.fr>]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2000 21:14:18 +0000 (GMT)
Manuel Gutierrez Algaba <algaba@gmx.net> wrote:

> On 5 Dec 2000, Michael Totschnig wrote:
> > your arguments for Latex seem all very convincing for me, but only
> > because I already know Latex and use it. If we try to propose Latex
> > for education to teachers and students who are not familiar with it
> > yet, I think other arguments have to be chosen.  
> 
> The best thing any learner can hear is :"it's easy to learn".
> 
> I've tried many times, many ways to convince them in (comp.text.tex)
> or in mailing list to get down to the real people, to develop a
> single unified tool where all available knowledge of TeX would be.
> Because, that's another advantage of LaTeX, lots of docs, easy,
> difficult, beautiful, ugly,... 
> If we had such a big tool comprising examples and doc,it'd be
> easy to learn. That thing is TeEncontreX, regretfully, TeX community
> is not interested in such effort ( they go on looking at their belly).
> 
> It took my 30 hours of my life. It's 200 articles long. The TeX
> community is about the 100,000 , probably more, if just a tiny
> fraction, 1 % would invest 1 hour of his life. Maybe the definitive
> tool for learning TeX could be done. 
> 

That's an interesting point of view.

I'm certainly no TeXpert, nor have I seen the pre-GNU era; but I would be pleased to offer my 1-hour contribution to the world.

However, I really don't see the need of yet another project for learning TeX. I've never bought a book on TeX, I've been learning LaTeX (not TeX) form open-source books (and even better, there are 2 pretty good ones in French!). 

When I have a question, I use the Info documentation, and I hear that grepping the FAQ is the ultimate source of information. It is said that typing "FAQ française" in any search engine on the internet gives you the French LaTeX FAQ as the first match.

And not to be forgotten, LyX does provide some help for learning LaTeX.

I also see something like the beginning of an informal community of LaTeX users build up in my university's small LUG (but only among students. Teachers don't mix with students clubs well). BTW, I assume LaTeX is what you should go for if you want to do typesetting without getting into the history of the influence of various political movements on the typesetting of spaces in your language. TeX is for the others.

If you have plans for a better tool for learning LaTeX than what now exists, then please tell us. There has to be someone who draws a framework, so that others be able to spend just one hour on it and still improve the big picture.

And have fun,

-- 
Thomas Tempé

All models are wrong.
Some models are useful.
	-- Geroge Box