Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!sif.claremont.edu
From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Really GENERIC questions on TeX
Message-ID: <7854@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 18 Jul 90 05:00:56 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 79

In article <1048100001@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu writes...

>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.

Well, the reason for this is that there are jillions of
DVI-to-whatever converters available. Not all of them work the
same (for example, on our VMS system, to print pages 3-5 of
foo.dvi, I would type dviout foo/pages=3:5 while on our Unix
system, the command is dvialw -o3:5 foo) and certainly they all
have different names. Plus, different sites might configure
things differently. Here at HMC, the DVI processors create a file
to be printed in a separate step. At UIC where I worked once upon
a time, all DVI processing was bundled into a program "PRINTTEX"
which would select the printer driver and handle converting
options to the format the driver wanted and print the output when
it was done). The reason most of the documentation doesn't
mention these things is that it is usually quite different
between sites.

>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?

Yep. LaTeX users (at least intelligent ones) can generally avoid
this problem.

>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}
>?

Any document which begins with \documentstyle is a LaTeX file.
Rather than saying "tex filename" you need to say "latex
filename". Just one of life's inconveniences.

>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.  

Try typing "apropos dvi" and see what you get ("apropos DVI"
might also be worth a shot).

>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).

Ever try moving binary files between machines? There are a lot of
bugbears lying around to trip one up. MVS, CMS and VMS all require
special system-dependent blocking. You can't e-mail a binary file
(easily) etc.

-dh

---
Don Hosek                         TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and
dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu         production work. Free Estimates.
dhosek@ymir.bitnet                
uunet!jarthur!ymir                Phone: 714-625-0147