Making TeX Work

By Norman Walsh
January 1900
Pages: 522
ISBN 10: 1-56592-051-1 | ISBN 13: 9781565920514

This book is OUT OF PRINT.

Book description

TeX is a powerful tool for creating professional quality typeset text and is unsurpassed at typesetting mathematical equations, scientific text, and multiple languages. Many books describe how you use TeX to construct sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Until now, no book described all the software that actually lets you build, run, and use TeX to best advantage on your platform. Making TeX Work guides you through the maze of tools and tells you how to obtain, configure, and use them.
Full Description

TeX is a powerful tool for creating professional quality typeset text and is unsurpassed at typesetting mathematical equations, scientific text, and multiple languages. Many books describe how you use TeX to construct sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Until now, no book has described all the software that actually lets you build, run, and use TeX to best advantage on your platform. Because creating a TeX document requires the use of many tools, this lack of information is a serious problem for TeX users. TeX is increasing in popularity, and the need for information is becoming more critical. Many technical journals now request that articles be submitted in TeX. TeX is also playing an increasing role in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) environment. TeX's portability and flexibility -- not to mention the fact that it is free -- are also making it the typesetting tool of choice for interchange between hardware and software platforms and for international exchange. Yet, despite this growing interest in TeX, TeX users everywhere are having to "reinvent the wheel" by wrestling with TeX's many tools and files on their own. Making TeX Work guides you through the maze of tools available in the overall TeX system. Beyond the core TeX program there are myriad drivers, macro packages, previewers, printing programs, online documentation facilities, graphics programs, and more. This book describes them all. It covers:
  • How to assemble the software you need to build and install TeX on all common platforms: UNIX, DOS, Macintosh, and VMS.
  • How to get TeX and its associated tools from public domain and commercial sources (a complete buyer's guide).
  • How to select and use the tools that let you incorporate graphics into your documents and create bibliographies, indices, and other complex document elements.
  • How to install and use fonts to best advantage, including PostScript and TrueType fonts and LaTeX's New Font Selection Scheme (NFSS).
Post-purchase benefits:

Register your book | Submit Errata | Other TeX Links | CTAN-Web | Examples

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Book details

First Edition: January 1900
ISBN: 1-56592-051-1
Pages: 522

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"Ordinarily I don't write mail complimenting product vendors (after all, it's their job to make a decent product :), but every rule has an exception.

"I recently bought the O'Reilly book, Making TeX Work, and I think that it's really great that someone, somewhere out there is producing well written technical references/tutorials (as opposed to the dozens of repetitive watered down books which are found so often in computer sections of bookstores) [for] utilities such as TeX. I've looked at several TeX/LaTeX references, and the only [one]...[I] found to be usable was Lamport's original volume, which doesn't provide the broad overview that makes the O'Reilly book so useful.

"Well done, thanks for writing usable books!

"(And on a superficial note, I think the covers are great. I'm becoming inclined to violate the proverb and start judging computer books by their covers.)" --Joel Erickson, O'Reilly customer

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