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From: phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Really GENERIC questions on TeX
Message-ID: <1048100001@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 18 Jul 90 02:44:00 GMT
Lines: 87
Nf-ID: #N:ux1.cso.uiuc.edu:1048100001:000:4837
Nf-From: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!phil    Jul 17 21:44:00 1990


I major problem I run into frequently, for ANY text processing language or
system, be it TeX, Script, Scribe, *roff, or what.have.you, is that these
systems are not made easy to use from the point of view of someone who
does NOT write text in these languages, but just needs to print a text file
they received from someone.

With an ordinary programming language like C or Pascal, it turns out to be
relatively easy to take what someone gives you and compile it, load it, and
come up with a runnable program.  I'm not a programmer of Pascal and never
will be, but yet I've had to compile programs in Pascal and this seems to
always be easy.  It is made even easier with make.

With text formatting systems, it seems these things are always hard to do.
I recently received some files in the IBM SCRIPT language, and the SCRIPT
processing program would not process them.  There was hundreds of error
messages.  The SCRIPT expert here took two weeks to figure it all out and
finally get things set up so that the files were printable.  She had to
do things with a number of files to make it work.

I have never used TeX before, but now I have occaision to need to USE it
from the point of view of simply getting a .tex file printed so I can read
it.  I assume that's the point of sending files in .tex, so that they can
be printed and read.  It is a document file for a program I received.

I read the TeX man page.  It told me how to run TeX to create a DVI file.
Clearly more needed to be done, but there were no references to anything
else to do.  It's as if all that people ever care to do is have DVI files.

Obviously there are questions I need to ask of those with more experience.
But in the past I have asked questions about specific cases, and got answers
that worked, but were so specific that they did not work when things were
changed somewhere.  I need to be careful to ask things in a generic way so
that the answers are not only useful now, but I can adapt them in the future
as well, without having to go back and ask similar questions over and over.

I have some books on TeX, from back when I was thinking about learning how
to write in the formatting language.  Lacking a program to process it then,
I never picked it up.  But these books deal with the problems of writing in
the language, not with processing and printing an already written TeX file
that was given to me.  Perhaps that is in there as well, but it is not
obvious from scanning the contents or index.

So what I am looking for now is NOT what I need to do to print my files,
but rather some general purpose information that tells me enough about how
the parts of TeX fit together so that I can figure out how to get the .tex
files I have printed.

One thing I notice is that there are usually lots of vast macros written
for many text formatting languages.  Apparently it is a practice to ASSUME
that everyone has every macro.  Is this a valid assumption with TeX?  If it
is, then the macros are public domain.  I suspect not, but I could be wrong.
What are the various macro libraries available?  How do I use them (from the
point of view of getting the .tex document printed, no in writing in TeX)?
It seems modularity has its disadvantages as well.  I program in macro
assembler language a lot, and find that when I send someone a program, I
frequently have to send them dozens of macros to go with it (most of which
I wrote, the rest of which are still not common anyway).  Is this (sending
macros with .tex) common in exchanging documents in TeX?

I simply ran the tex command giving it the name of one of the files I need
printed, and it said:

! undefined control sequence.
l.5 \documentstyle
                  [makeidx]{article}
?

and it seemed to be waiting for my input.  I killed the program and gave up.
What in general needs to be done here?  Surely there is not really an error
in the .tex file, is there?

The next step is that I will end up with a DVI file (I assume a file with
and extension of .dvi).  This I understood from the man page for tex.  But
it did not say what do to with the dvi file.  I tried "man dvi" but there
was no such man page.  So, what do I do with a .dvi file?  Also, is there
any documentation on what the format of a .dvi file is?  And if a DVI file
is truly device independent, why isn't the .dvi file exchanged instead of
the .tex file?  I know; I might want to modify the document for some reason
and a .dvi is not (easily) human readable (much like the machine language
object code output of a compiler).

Thanks in advance for any generally useful information anyone might be able
to post and/or send me about what TeX is all about and how to use it.

--Phil Howard, KA9WGN-- | Individual CHOICE is fundamental to a free society
<phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> | no matter what the particular issue is all about.