LaTeX type setting system.

[Guest guest]

[i received several letters from different devotees including NA BBT and

Gopal Jiu Publishers with a request to tell more about the LaTeX (pronounced

as la-te-h) type setting system, thus I decided to post here what I wrote in

my reply to them, so that others who might want to know more about LaTeX can

learn about it here. I know I run the risk to get flooded by many letters

with further inquiries about how LaTeX works, but I hope I will find time to

serve all of you, at present I am in the last semester week at university,

then I will have 2 months time till the next semester.]

 

Dear Prabhu,

please accept my respectful obeisances.

All glories to Sri Sri Guru-Gauranga and Sri Sri Radha-Govinda.

 

To begin with, I will give you basic information about LaTeX, so that you

can understand what kind of software it is.

 

First of all, LaTeX type setting system is not a WYSIWYG text editor like MS

Word. I dont know how good you are with computers and am not aware of how

well you know these technical terms, so I will explain you here what this

means.

 

In MS Word, when you enter/edit some text, it will look exactly the same way

as you can see it on the screen. That's why it is called WYSIWYG (What You

See Is What You Get). LaTeX on the contrary is sort of a programming

language, in the sense that you enter a simple ASCII text, and add line

commands there where you want the text to look in one or another way. It is

very much similar to HTML, you put a <tag> infront of a text if you want to

make it look different. By the way, this is the only difficulty that a user

has to face when you start learning how to use LaTeX, but it's really worth

it, and time spent with learning the commands of LaTeX will fructify in the

end with texts with a very professional layout. Many of these commands, as

you might have already guessed, allow LaTeX to solve tasks that WYSIWYG text

editors cant do at all or require more routine work.

 

So, if you want to use LaTeX, and I do recommend this to everyone who wants

to write excellent texts with Indian scripts, then you have to be ready to

learn the commands of LaTeX.

 

Now, where can you get the LaTeX software. There are different

"distributions" of LaTeX, just like in case with Linux, there is Suse Linux,

Mandrake Linux, etc etc. Similarly, there are different LaTeX distributions.

I cant say much about in how far they differ from each other, so I will just

concentrate myself on the distribution that I use myself, namely, MiKTeX.

 

MiKTeX package can be downloaded at the www.miktex.org site. On the left

side of the homepage you will see "DOWNLOAD" and "MiKTeX 2.1" (I wouldnt

recommend for you as a beginner to download "MiKTeX 2.2 Beta 1"). On the

download page you will find all needed information on how to download and

install MiKTeX on your PC. Actually, you will first download a small setup

file, you will use it for both the actual download and installation.

 

MiKTeX itself is offered in 3 forms: a "Small" and a "Large" version of

100MB each, and a "Total" version of 500MB. I dont know your computer's hard

drive's capacities, but I would strongly recommend you to download the 500MB

version, because then you can be sure that you have ALL packages installed

on your PC, otherwise you will need to search, download, and install

separate packages for Sanskrit or Bengali scripts which only adds more work.

 

After you have installed MiKTeX, you should be able to start writing texts

right away. But this is the first step where you have to know what and how

to write. For writing texts you can use absolutely any text editor you want,

without an exception. But, if you use something like MS Word then you must

be sure that you save your texts in ASCII format, because LaTeX works with

pure and simple ASCII. That's why simple Notepad is best for this purpose

because it saves files in TXT format which is the ASCII format.

 

There is a somewhat more elegant and useful text editor for LaTeX users,

namely, WinEdt ("Edt" is not misspelt!). You can download it at the

www.winedt.com site. But please note that it's a Shareware product,

nevertheless you can still use it even after the 31-day long trial period (I

have been using it for almost 2 months now). Even though you can use LaTeX

without WinEdt, still I would suggest you to download and install it, too.

 

Well, I think this information should be sufficient for you at first stage.

If you have any further questions, feel free to write and ask me about them,

I will help as far as I can (I am still a LaTeX beginner myself!).

 

Your humble servant,

Sergei.