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Comment by jpallen | Hacker News Reader

As soon as I read his opening piece I thought 'this guy needs to use LaTeX', so I'm glad that he did in the end. I've benefited a lot from the stories and comments here at HN, so I'd like to offer my help in getting you started with LaTeX if you'd like to do something similar.

I'd say that the major of downside of LaTeX is that it's not very accessible. One of my goals at the moment is to improve that, and that's part of my motivation for working on ShareLaTeX [1], which is probably one of the easiest ways to get started with LaTeX (I am of course biased.) We've cut out all of the installation and configuration needed to set up LaTeX, so you can dive straight in.

[1] https://www.sharelatex.com

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The biggest accessibility problem I have with LaTeX for bookwriting is that the stylesheet language is very strange by modern standards. You can ignore it if you're writing academic papers with a provided stylesheet (or with one of the default ones), but you often will want to do some custom formatting if you're writing a book. I've heard ConTeXt might be an improvement, though.

Context is better for book type content, if you want to do things like sidebars, colors, etc. It's also a little more "do what I say" vs LaTeX's "do what you think is best", which generally produces good results, but can be infuriating when e.g. you really want a figure and certain text on the same page or something like that.

You have a good point there. The problem is that LaTeX doesn't have a fundamental distinction between 'style' and 'commands'. Everything is really just a command, but by convention some of them are wrappers around predefined styles, like \section and \chapter for example. If you want to change the style of these yourself then you have to dive into the internals of LaTeX where things get messy.

Thanks for the input!

The biggest problem I had with LaTeX was after the book was done and I wanted to get it ready for Kindle and Epub. Luckily I found tex4ht which compiles LaTeX to HTML/XML which I just needed to write CSS for.

Writing the book using LaTeX is one of the best decisions that I made.

If all this typesetting talk has ignited people's interest in LaTeX then I can recommend a handy beginner's guide: Getting to Grips with LaTeX (http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex) I can recommend it because I wrote it ;)

Funnily enough I've been meaning to make my guide into a self-published book too...

Thank you for these tutorials. I have been willing to teach LaTeX to some of my grad students friends in the biology department (these poor souls still use Microsoft Word) and your link will definitely come in handy !

Rest assured that my tutorials have been tried-and-tested by many under- and post-grads over the years. They've been included in college & university syllabi and I've get a lot of positive feedback from postgrads who've opted for the LaTeX route rather than word processors.

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