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Most materials about LaTeX I tend to find on the web seem to be of the 'programming by StackOverflow' variety, i.e. 'copy this snippet of code, tweak it to your
by pwdisswordfish 10y ago
Most materials about LaTeX I tend to find on the web seem to be of the 'programming by StackOverflow' variety, i.e. 'copy this snippet of code, tweak it to your needs and compile'; they don't teach you about what the code actually does, how it interacts with everything else, and there is no syntax specification apart from series of digressions like 'oh, by the way, if you wish to achieve effect X, you can use option Y'. Unfortunately, even official documentation for LaTeX packages is often written that way (a major pleasant exception is the documentation for TikZ). In the short term, it may seem fine, but it inevitably comes back to bite the user later. The guide submitted here doesn't seem particularly different.
For those wishing to learn some 'theoretical' TeX, I can recommend TeX by Topic.[0] It mentions LaTeX macros only in passing, but even that amount was quite helpful to me.
[0] https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoI agree with the documentation issue. In addition to TikZ, the Memoir package manual is a pleasant surprise. It's really thorough, and I definitely recommend reading it if you are writing up your thesis in LaTeX.
- 2ion 10y agoAnother well documented set of general-purpose classes are the KOMAscript document classes, catering mostly to European document conventions [1]. [1] https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script
- JadeNB 10y agoSince this thread has turned into a discussion of nice documentation, I've always thought that beamer (http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beam...) 's is quite nice. I also second the recommendation for TeX by Topic, which is lovely. Grätzer's Math into LaTeX (https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX) is nice but outdated, and Knuth's TeXbook (freely available, but only as source, at http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook) is, of course, the original definitive resource. (Links to the other currently mentioned documentation: http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf (of which TikZ is a sub-/co-package) and http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.p... ; and 2ion already linked to the KOMAScript documentation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476).)