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Comment by PeachPlum | Hacker News Reader

I know Lua

I process text (not in Lua). I do a bit of Troff, html, stuff like that.

Where to start learning ?

First you need to learn a bit about how to use LaTeX. I learned this decades ago and am not sure what is the best introduction now, but this is sometimes recommended:

http://ctan.mirrors.hoobly.com/info/lshort/english/lshort.pd...

Then, look at the links in my article, and you should be able to start doing something interesting.

I also wonder where to start, but with TeX and luaTex, and not LaTeX. Is that a distinction worth making?

If you want to start with TeX, I highly recommend the book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy. One of the developers behind LuaTeX also strongly recommends it (in the preface to the ConTeXt manual), and calls it "the book that turns every beginner into an expert". This one is more readable than the TeXbook, and builds up your intuition nicely. Learning LuaTeX is relatively easier after you understand the basic design of TeX.

Sure, if you want to use plain TeX, and not LaTeX. To get a really thorough grounding, you can read Donald Knuth's TexBook. I'm sure there are also briefer guides online.

I'm just wondering, and I don't really have an opinion.

If you are an ordinary producer of documents (plain text, articles,tech reports, letters, mathematical documents, etc.) you should start with LaTeX, not TeX. It is uncommon to write in plain TeX and this has been so for many years. In practice, you will use mostly LaTeX constructs, and the simplest TeX ones, which the LaTeX guide would include.

FWIW, I started with LaTeX a few years ago, and Overleaf.com really helped. Even though I prefer local development and generally work that way, Overleaf has Git integration, sharing features, and works when I've messed up my development environment.

Co-founder of Overleaf passing through and I just wanted to say thanks for the mention - glad you found it (and the git integration [1]) useful :)

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195

You might find this introduction to the different flavors of TeX useful: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/500-whats-in-a-name-a-guide-to...

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