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What Is The Collection For

Table of Contents

Purpose of this collection

This collection is not meant to replace the Latex books, but to complement it. You should first read the books. I found two free Latex tutorial books to be most helpful.

What's unique of this collection is that only key points are listed here, so newbie would not be overwhelmed by the flood of the information. I.e., this collection tries to include every aspect that you'll going to meet. It covers everything I need to know to write my master thesis. So it help you get started easily. However, it does not try to cover everything. This can be explained by the following points:

There are over 6 ways to include your source code/data in Latex. This collection only cover the one that I picked — the listing package.
The document that show you how to include the graph in Latex (epslatex.pdf) is nearly 100 pages. I extracted the most important contents into this file.

Plese don't get me wrong, this note collection does not only simplify things, it make things comprehensive too:

For seldom used, less documented tasks such as making address labels, or coloring/shading table fields, this note does not ends with telling you what to use, as most doc/faqs does, but goes further showing how to do it.
If you happen to come here for the same answer that I was looking for, eg. make file for latex, latex to rtf/html/text converter, BibTeX tools, or as detail as APA/Chicago styles, double column settings, color/shade texts etc, you will find the collection pretty comprehensive, because I always exhaust my search before coming to any conclusion, since I don't want to miss anything good that is "out there".

In summary, this collection tries to pick the most important and eliminating the less important while preserve the link/hint to the original place for your further investigation.

Differences between this collection and tex faq

*Q:* Since there is already an official tex faq, why do you still maintain this collection?

*A:* They serve entirely different purposes. The tex faq focuses on what, why, who, when, etc, while this collection focuses on how.

Think if you are responsible to maintain the tex faq, what do you think are important to put in? What the tex package is for, why need such package, who wrote it, when, its history, etc, are all important to faq.

This collection, however, focuses solely on how, especially how to use. The faq may say check tex package xyz for details, but this collection will practically show you how to use the tex package xyz, and maybe gives several examples for it.

This collection should really be called LaTex By Examples. Examples are very important, because it needs considerable knowledge to figure out from man page or tech docs how to build Latex line by line to use a certain package, but it is quiet easy to grab a working copy and adapt it to your own need. I don't know Lisp language at all, but I am able to write several Emacs modules. Why? Simply because I can follow examples. With plenty of examples, you don't need to know the Latex language for you to use it too.

documented on: 2006.10.09