LaTeX

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Serge Rey and he introduced me to LaTeX (as well as vim's folding capabilities). Since then Alan, and probably others, expounded the virtues of LaTeX for marking up documents.

When I needed to document James' role I took a crash course in LaTeX, installed TeXShop and TeX on my University-supplied G4, and started typing furiously.

I found it very easy to learn the basics of, and soon had piles of PDFs and a desk littered with beautiful white A4 papers.

Gotchas and trouble

Things they didn't tell you and I had to find out the hard way:

• Mathematical symbols (PDF) only work in mathematical mode. eg:
  • tilde: \ensuremath{\sim}
  • left angle (less than): \ensuremath{<}
  • right angle (greater than): \ensuremath{>}
  • an arrow: \ensuremath{\rightarrow}
• Less than and greater than can be done in \texttt{} mode instead, or you could quickly escape to mathematical mode. eg, $>$
• You need to escape underscores, dollar signs, ampersands, percentage symbols, hashes, and curly braces. eg: \_
• There are no automagic curly quotes. Use ` and '.
• For double quotes, just use two single quotes. Use `` and ''.
• Tables don't automatically size to the page.

Since I hardly know anything about LaTeX, I'm probably barking up the wrong tree. Someone please enlighten me.