High-Level Overview: How does Tex or LaTeX process documents? - latex

While there are whole StackExchanges devoted to Tex and a tag [tex] on here there is very little on the program itself. The last time I tried to ask, I got cut off for misusing the phrase "TeX engine" - I was told it's not an engine. My bad.
What are the steps in turning a TeX document into a file? Even for just a single equation what are the steps TeX goes through to display that equation.
With some effort, I could find a book Tex, the Program. One possible answer could be just a summary. I am also intrigued that it's claimed to be an example of functional program, but that's not important. Thanks.
I would like to know why the code has not improved since 1982. Why attempts to improve on TeX have failed.
Is the source code on GitHub anywhere? etc.

Related

What's the best way to understand the TeX / LaTeX internals?

Looking through docs on the TeX website, it seems like almost all documentation for TeX and LaTeX are tutorials on how to use them, how to install fonts, how to get graphics working, etc.
What should I look at if I want to know more about how TeX works? For instance, I want to know about its parser grammar. I want to know how its text engine works, how it decides hyphenation, how it flows text, how it decides on box layouts.
It seems like TeX and LaTeX are built up on several layers of different technologies. (Metafont, etc.) Is there any resources that describe step by step the TeX system from the ground up? How it goes from parsing a text file, into how this is represented and transformed, and finally how it ends up in a particular page layout?
There are essentially two resources on TeX itself: one is the TeXbook by Don Knuth, along with the typeset documented sourcecode itself (Vol's A and C of Computers and Typesetting), the other one is Victor Eijkhout's TeX by Topic, which is available for download.

How to generate a document like this in Latex

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/papers/acm-queue-ie.pdf
I want to write a document that has the style like this one.
Like having a light colored background on a page, having a big header (like the EXTRACTION) shown in this link. Do you think it is possible to something like this in Latex?
I am comfortable with doing normal things in latex.
If you download and look at the document properties, it was made with InDesign CS3. Could you do this in LaTeX? Yes. The cover page is... just a cover page. If you use fancyhdr and make a page header, you can increase the header height, then lay the page header in there as an image. Try eso-pic for page backgrounds. But in all honesty, that document is kind of ugly. :D
Your best bet for a document like this is to use a desktop publishing system. A Free/Open Source Software solution would be Scribus Desktop Publishing.
Off the top of my head:
-- check out ConTeXt, strictly speaking an alternative to LaTeX but one designed for something closer to DTP than LaTeX itself;
-- LaTeX has lots of facilities for DTP-like work, a good place to start would be the newsletter on link text
-- investigate packages such as PGF/TKZ, eso-pic, newspaper.
That document smell like made with InDesign or QuarkXPress ... I guess there is a way to do it in latex but will not be straightforward at all ...
Actually it's quite feasible using LaTeX, it's just a pity that the learning curve and the technical involvement are higher than when using DTP tools like Adobe InDesign.
This explains why few people are willing to involve the required amount of time and energy into mastering LaTeX for such kind of projects, and consequently why few introductory material is available on the subject.
One notable exception is the recent workshop given by Dominik Wagenführ at Ubucon 2009 in Göttingen. Its proceedings are freely available a the bottom of the page, as well as the related source code. It's all in German but fairly easy to understand and very educational, so I'd recommand you to study it.

Does anyone know resources for LaTex

I want to use LaTex to write equations faster and if it is possible to export the result as a png or jpg so that it can be used on a website.
Wikipedia (and its opensource wiki engine) uses LaTeX for that, maybe there are some resources available (at least in the code, as it is opensource).
Your question is very broad. You could start with Amazon's List of Latex Books.
You might want to investigate the StackExchange site mathoverflow.net solution - you can read about here. It uses jsMath which supports a lot of LaTeX syntax.
Assuming you already know a little LateX and your primary goal is to get images, a good high-level tool is mathTeX; there are even public servers that will convert to images for you.
If you want to do everything yourself, all the tools use dvipng at bottom.
I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output. See also this question.
try this: http://hausheer.osola.com/latex2png
Here is a small symbol reference for LaTeX. If you are looking for something more as a general introduction, you can look at "The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e". If you use Inkscape, there is built in support for rendering LaTeX and there are also extensions that do the same. You can read some commentary about it here. There are also things like LaTeX to HTML converters; However, at the time I was looking at them, they were somewhat limited in what formulas they could display.
I taught myself LaTeX using the wikibook. It's fairly comprehensive as an initial guide. I've since bought The LaTeX Companion, which is a more advanced guide to in depth typesetting in LaTeX
I use http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS_L_TeXer.php when I need a quick equation for a web site.
There are packages that will automatically produce images from LaTeX source, but these are often either buggy or used incorrectly. Many people install them on their blogs, for example, and the images show up if you visit the blog directly but they don't show up if you view the page via a blog reader. I'm not saying these problems can't be fixed. They can, but it often takes a few tries.
I prefer just to make a gif and stick it in the page. It's low tech and reliable.
One more tip: it's a good idea to put the LaTeX source in the alt tag of the image. This helps people using screen readers. It helps you too if you need to modify the equation later.
Detextify is a great site that lets you draw a symbol, and it will pop up a list of latex commands that may match your drawing. It's quite accurate! http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Open Source LaTeX environment for educational books? [closed]

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Fully aware of the LaTeX features to define new environment allowing me to do about anything, I was wondering if there are Open Source packages that allows me to do book branding by predefining environments for examples, excursions, listings, question sections, etc. For example, have an example environment with a blue-ish background, sections with further details which can be skipped by the casual reader in yellow, etc.
Today, I have been playing a bit with the float package, and customized the .sty to have a environment with a blue background, but did not manage to tune the macro's such to have change the font style to sans-serif.
Now, this is just an example, but I figured that many people must have been doing this to give their book a somewhat more professional look. Are there LaTeX package around that allow me to focus on the content, instead spending time on LaTeX coding to make environments stand out from the main text?
Is there a document class that allows me to just do:
\documentclass{fancyeducationalbook}
\begin{document}
\begin[bgcolor=orange]{fancyExampleEnvironment}
% showing up in the PDF with a orange background
\end{fancyExampleEnvironment}
\end{document}
It does not have to be perfect at all, but it does need to make various boxes stand out, and immediately be recognizable for first-year students as having some purpose (example, further reading, definition, etc); The key is that it makes the book look attractive.
I do not mind some hacking, but a good basis would be nice. Very much preferred, this base would be Open Source, so that I can reshare my customizations, if any needed.
Update: I'd welcome a system which supports multipage environments.
I did ask a similar question a few weeks ago:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1783400/developing-ebooks-software
where a couple of responses mentioned some other tools and packages.
Obviously LaTeX has the book style and those sorts of things, but one must remember it's primarily a scientific document producing tool - which it's fantastic for, but for other tasks there are often tools more suited to the job:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB - the e-book publishing standard
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ - a free GNUv3 editor for edocs
http://www.lulu.com/ - a fully integrated publishing toolset - for creating, editing and selling ebooks (if you want to go that far) - although this one's not open source of course...
Good luck, let us know what you find if you spot anything else - I'm still on the hunt for the 'ideal' tool :)
The usual recommendation for a more configurable long document class is memoir (read the extensive [manual PDF link).
Colored environment background and the like will probably have to be brought in with additional classes.
Take a look at context, a tex-based typesetting system which was designed for education publishing. It deals with page layout in a much more sophisticated manner than latex, and can give much more distinctive results.
I recommend not using anything fancy when writing the context: focus on the text and content-necessary graphics until the text is complete; get it edited and only then work through the typesetting. Trying to edit the document after it has been typeset is an invitation to redo work.
It is fairly painless to convert from latex to context. There's more work involved learning context than latex, but, well, you want good results?
Postscript: ConTeXt: An Excursion provides an introduction to the main document preparation features of context, and showcases its integration with metapost. The document has hyperlink navigation, which doesn't work with all pdf viewers.
Some of the documents on the TeX Showcase are prepared in context. There are some impressive latex examples there, too: you can get good results with latex, but it is, I think much harder work.
The contextgarden wiki has a list of official documentation, and From LaTeX to ConTeXt, the document migration advice. Migrating documents isn't hard, once you've got the hang of context.
Related questions:
LaTeX report chapter styles
Edit #2: you may want to check out http://www.math.harvard.edu/computing/latex/color.html, particularly the section about 2/3 of the way down called "Coloured box backgrounds"... also this link http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1441&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a talks about the framed package which will color environment backgrounds, apparently.
Edit: Made it into its own command.
\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\definecolor{shade}{HTML}{884763}
\newcommand{\uglybg}[1]{%
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node [fill=shade,rounded corners=5pt]
{%
\begin{minipage}{1\textwidth}
#1
\end{minipage}
};%
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\begin{document}
\uglybg{some text here please}
\end{document}
Profr. Jim Hefferon has written a book on Linear Algebra using LaTeX. He shares the source code in the following site:
http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/
The terms of use of the source code are the GNU Free Documentation License
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
Check out his code. I like the formatting of the book.
I am doing some notes on basic math, but to be honest,
I think that the macros still need improvement.
Check out the notes (all in spanish) at
http://www.aprendematematicas.org.mx/notas.html

Which is the best import / export LaTeX tool?

Working in academia publishing CS/math, you sooner or later find yourself trying to publish in a journal that will only accept .doc/.rtf. This means tedious, boring hours of translating line after line, especially equations, from LaTeX to an inferior format. Over the years I have tried a number of export tools for LaTeX, but none, at least of the free ones, that I have been very satisfied with. I'd like this page to collect and monitor the best import/export tools for LaTeX, to .doc/.rtf, or to other useful (e.g. HTML, MATHML) formats.
Thus, what is your one favorite import or export LaTeX tool?
AFAIK there isn't really a convenient and effective way to achieve what you're trying to do. What I usually do in those rare occasions is that I export to pdf, then select all the text, and paste into word. It's horrible and messes things up and of course doesn't adjust your citations.
To this day I don't understand how people writing in scientific fields can write and publish in Word. It is common in some human-computer interaction literature but I have not seen it in other conferences and journals. May I ask which one it is?
Also, some places, once you've already been accepted, will be willing to accept a PDF if you push it with them. You may have to make little adjustment yourself. Negotiations sometimes work on this.
The UK TeX FAQ has been collecting answers on this for quite some time now. :)
See Conversion from (La)TeX to HTML and Other conversions to and from (La)TeX. There is another FAQ specifically about Converters between LaTeX and PC Textprocessors maintained by Wilfried Hennings.
For LaTeX to HTML there are LaTeX2HTML, TtH, Tex4ht, TeXpider and Hevea; in my experience TeX4ht is the best. For LaTeX to Word, you can go through RTF with TeX2RTF (not so good), or through Adobe Acrobat which can produce PDF that Word can read (not good either), or go through HTML as above, but best is to use tex4ht which can generate OpenOffice ODT format, from which conversion to Word is easy.
The UK TeX FAQ also has many other useful things; you should take a look.

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