Author(s) : Michael Doob
Publication Date : Jan 2002 

 

Book excerpts :

First the bad news: TeX is a large and complicated program that goes to extraordinary lengths to produce attractive typeset material. This very complication can cause unexpected things to happen at times. Now the good news: straightforward text is very easy to typeset using TeX. So it?s possible to start with easier text and work up to more complicated situations.

The purpose of this manual is to start from the very beginning and to move towards these more complicated situations. No previous knowledge of TeX is assumed. By proceeding a section at a time, greater varieties of text can be produced.

While this is a pretty short manual (97 pages), it does enough to give the readers every basic things they need to know about TeX. As the title suggests, this is a gentle introduction afterall. So this book suits nicely for busy readers who need to know the basics and start right away.

Here are a few suggestions: there are some exercises in each section. Be sure and do them! The only way to learn TeX is by using it. Better yet, experiment on your own; try to make some variations on the exercises. There is no way that you can damage the TeX program with your experiments. You can find a complete answer to most exercises by looking at the TeX source file that was used to produce this document. You?ll notice that there are references in the right margin to The TEXbook (Addison-Wesley 1984). When you feel that you want more information on a topic, that?s where to look. 

View/Download A Gentle Introduction to TeX