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A brief guide to text processing sources

Selecting the following will guide you to sources (or meta-sources) for information concerning text processing, i.e. TeX, LaTeX, SGML, etc.

• TeX and ancillaries
• SGML and ancillaries
• PostScript and ancillaries
• Troff/Nroff/Groff etc.
• Literate programming

• TeX and ancillaries:

  Following are sections on TeX documents, software and sites.

  • Documents about TeX. This section includes documents of a tutorial or education nature concerning the TeX typesetting system.

  • Hypertext documents about TeX. Here are some TeX etc. help files written in HTML.

  • TeX software. This section contains pointers to some of the more interesting and/or useful ancillary packages for TeX.

  • TeX sites. This section has links to other sites with large collections of TeXstuff.

  • LaTeX information. Information about the newest version of LaTeX: LaTeX2e.

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  • Documents about TeX:
    • An interview with Donald Knuth. The grand imperial royal wizard stomper of the universe is queried.

    • What is TeX and Metafont all about? is a summary of TeX, its flavours and Metafont in the context of electronic publishing by C. G. van der Laan. It is a fairy good overall introduction to the beast.

    • TeX Made Easy: Using TeX with the Plain Macro Package by Daniel Zirin was assembled as a supplement to "The TeXbook" for beginners. The result is used by the author for a 5 day, 10 hour introduction to TeX and is suitable for use by even the rawest neophyte. This links to a 232 kb compressed PostScript version of the manual.

    • A Gentle Introduction to TeX by Michael Doob. This guide is for absolute beginners. It starts with processing flat ascii text files and goes on to more complex documents. The source file is written in plain TeX.

    • The Components of TeX by Joachim Schrod is a guide to TeX and the various ancillary programs and components that are needed to typeset documents. This gives the information on the ancillary packages that is usually lacking in the basic tutorials. This manual is written using LaTeX.

    • An Introduction to TeX and Friends by Gavin Maltby is what the author describes as an attempt to explain the features and subtleties of TeX that make it the useful typesetting system that it is. It is typeset using LaTeX.

    • David Wilkins has written a series of four manuals on Plain TeX and LateX entitled "Getting Started with [Plain TeX/LaTeX]" and "Summary of Commonly-Used Features of [Plain TeX/LaTeX]". The source code of these manuals is processed using LaTeX. See the README file for details.

    • An Introduction to TeX/LaTeX Document Production Systems by Jingbai Wang is a 99 page introduction to help new users get started with both TeX and LaTeX for papers, theses, and other technical documents. This selects a 670 kb tarred and compressed package that contains the manual as texint.ps (374 kb).

    • Essential LaTeX by Jon Warbrick is a short guide to information essential for running LaTeX. It is a good manual for quickly typesetting a simple document, but not recommended for more complex tasks. It is written in LaTeX.

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  • Hypertext documents about TeX:
    • Plain TeX help. This is online help for the Plain TeX typesetting package. It was derived from Anthony Stark's Plain TeX Reference.

    • LaTeX help. This is online help for the LaTeX macros that simplify typesetting documents with the Plain TeX package.

    • BibTeX help. This is online help for the ancillary bibliography package for TeX/LaTeX.

    • Makeindex help. This is online help for the ancillary program that helps create an index from a TeX document.

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  • TeX software
    • Lollipop is a macro package written by Victor Eijkhout (author of "TeX by Topic") that functions as a toolbox for writing TeX macros. The intention was to make macro writing so easy that implementing a fully new layout in TeX would be a matter of less than an hour for an average document. The link is to the tarred and gzipped (120 kb) package. A tarred and gzipped (106 kb) PostScript version of the manual is separately available.

    • LameTeX: A text formatter for special effects by Jonathan Monsarrati. This package, written in C++ and PostScript but compatible with LaTeX, allows complete versatility of the printed page. You can format text inside a triangular or circular page or even include pictures of any size and shape and let the text flow around or inside them. The link here is to a tarred and compressed package (455 kb) containing the manual and the software.

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  • TeX sites
    • Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). This selects an FTP connection to the CTAN site in the U.S. at ftp.shsu.edu. These archives contain anything and everything (or they're trying hard to do so) pertaining to TeX.
  • LaTeX information:

    LaTeX is a set of macros built on top of the plain TeX package that simplify typesetting by letting the user concentrate on the structure of the text rather than on formatting commands.

    • As of June 1994 the official LaTeX version is LaTeX2e. There are three documents describing this version contained within the official distribution. These are LaTeX2e for authors, which describes the new features of LaTeX documents, LaTeX2e for class and package writers, which describes the new features of LaTeX classes and packages, and LaTeX2e font selection, which describes the new features of LaTeX fonts for class and package writers. These documents must be processed with LaTeX2e.

  The most complete sources of information for LaTeX2e are LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Ed.) by Leslie Lamport and The LaTeX Companion by Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin. Be sure to obtain the second edition of Lamport's book since the first doesn't contain information about the LaTeX2e extensions.

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• SMGL and ancillaries:

  Following are sections on SGML documents, software, and sites.

  • SGML documents
  • SGML software
  • SGML sites

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  • SGML documents:
    • SGML microtutorial/introduction. This is an extremely brief but good introduction to SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language.

    • A Gentle Introduction to SGML. This is part of a book published by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) entitled "Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange".

    • SGML FAQ. This is the list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for SGML and related topics.

    • Catalog of SGML tools. This is a catalog of tools, both public and commercial, available for processing documents using SGML. It is available as either a PostScript or flat ASCII text file.

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  • SGML software:
    • SGMLS is a validating SGML parser that outputs a simple ASCII representation of the Element Structure Information Set of the document being processed. The SGMLS source code (424 kb compressed and tarred) is available.

    • The Integrated Chameleon Architecture (ICA) is a toolset for generating data translators, particularly to and from a constrained subset of instances of SGML Document Type Definitions (DTD). The ICA source code (700 kb gzipped and tarred) is available as is a 186 page ICA manual (791 kb gzipped and tarred).

    • The CoST (Copenhagen SGML Tool) is a structure controlled SGML application programming tool built on top of SGMLS and programmed using the TCL package. The CoST source code (164 kb compressed and tarred) is available as is the CoST manual (66,095 kb compressed PostScript) and a conference paper (74,229 kb compressed PostScript) about the package.

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  • SGML sites:
    • SGML sources and documentation. This selects a meta-resource for SGML which contains pointers to most significant sites containing information about SGML and its ancillaries. It doesn't point to the next site.

    • The Sunsite SGML Archives. This archive mirrors the other major archives which, given that the others aren't located in the continental U.S. (Norway, for instance), can be advantageous if you are.

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• Postscript and ancillaries:
  • A First Guide to PostScript. This is an online HTML introduction to the PostScript page description language.

  • A PostScript Tutorial and Reference. This is a brief tutorial and reference guide to PostScript. The file is compressed PostScript.

  • PostScript FAQ. This directory contains the various parts of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list for the comp.lang.postscript USENET group.

  • PostScript sources FAQ. This directory contains the various parts of the comp.sources.postscript USENET group's FAQ, which contains a list of all programs posted to that group. Here is a link to the compressed sources of the programs in the list.

  • Lout typesetting system. Lout is a typsetting system that outputs PostScript source code. The package contains the program and several well-written manuals.
  • psutils
    A set of utilities with which to process PostScript source code files. These include psbook, which rearranges pages into signatures, psselect, which selects pages and page ranges for printing, pstops, which performs general page rearrangement and selection, psnup, which puts multiple pages per physical sheet of paper, psresize, which alters the document paper size, and epsffit, which fits an EPSF file to a given bounding box.
    [ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/ajcd/]

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• Troff/Nroff/Groff etc.:
  • Troff user's manual. This is the official Troff user's manual by Ossanna and Kernighan from Bell Labs. It is a technical report written in PostScript and in compressed form.

• Literate programming:
  • An excellent introduction to all aspects of literate programming can be found at Marcus Speh's Literate Programming home page.

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