Cutting Over to LaTeX
Published at 15:15 on 20 August 2023
The above use of StUdLy CaPs courtesy of a community somewhat enamored of them. An overly-cute quirk that for a long time made me shy away from that document preparation system. It’s silly, to be sure, and hardly the No. 1 reason, which is that I had by that time:
- Already had learned troff, which provides the same general functionality,
- Often I did not have access to a laser printer, and troff shares an input language with nroff, which can produce passable output on a simpler and at the time much more common typewriter-like printer. TeX and LaTeX, by contrast, are useless if you don’t have access to a laser printer, phototypesetter, or graphics display.
Time passes. LaTeX grows to be way more popular than poor old troff. Users deveop and share all sorts of macros to do just about anything you want. Those same users have many online forums that can be searched if you get stuck or puzzled. troff gains nothing equivalent. Get frustrated buy troff‘s inability to set text that wraps around illustrations (a standard book publishing technique).
So yeah, it was time. The final push that made spend most of a day reading Knuth’s definitive description of his program was my resumed job search, the desire to make a résumé that breaks a few of the rules (using some of my favourite fonts), and the difficulty of getting good font support for troff. By contrast, there are modern versions of TeX that can read standard font files.
(Yes, I know there are modern versions of troff that can apparently read standard font files. The rub is, they lack certain extensions to standard troff in the version I have been using, extensions that I am making use of, so I would have to rewrite anyhow. Plus. troff still can’t format output by wrapping around illustrations. Why not rewrite in the more powerful and full-featured alternative?)
Anyhow, I’ve now learned enough of LaTeX to make it do what I want to do… for now, which was the goal.