Publishing tools

Recommended Week

Year 1 : All Weeks

Originator

Dan Page

Aim

To learn about available tools for preparing documents (this is useful, as students will need to prepare many documents and thesis during their studies).

Task

Like programming languages, there are loads of different systems to prepare documents and they are suited for different tasks. Please do some research, ie. read about and find out about, the following systems:

LaTeX

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
• http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer

troff, nroff and groff

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groff

Word or OpenOffice

• http://www.microsoft.com/office
• http://www.openoffice.org/

HTML

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html
• http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

PostScript and PDF

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

The above links are useful to start with but don't stop with those. Pay particular note to what they are good for and what they are bad for. You might want to try out some sample documents in all the systems. Nothing fancy, just some text, different font styles etc.

Obviously you don't need to spend hours and hours on this, the idea is to just get some idea of the merits of systems other than Word !