[texhax] Do any college courses exist in TeX?

[Alan Litchfield]

To be honest, I think you are over thinking the problem. I doubt you 
actually need to learn TeX, unless of course that is what you want to 
do. Then you ought to start reading up on 
http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/info/gentle/gentle.pdf

However with LaTeX there is very little you need to memorise and mostly 
that is just the order in which you need to perform actions.

Assuming you are using Windows, if you install MiKTeX you will find all 
the commands and packages you need are already organised for you, and if 
you use an interface/editor like WinEDT you will find that most common 
functions are represented as buttons to click on.

I would suggest you get one of George Gratzer's books and start there. 
His latest has nice and easy examples to work through and that you can 
build on when you are feeling more confident.

Alan

On 23/06/15 7:58 am, resolvent at comcast.net wrote:
> Dear TeX Group,
>
> Do you know of any community or 4-year colleges which explicitly offer
> a credit-course in TeX typesetting or any of its numerous variants
> (LaTeX, etc),
> specifically in the New Jersey / Philadelphia area?
>
> I have never learned TeX, in spite of trying at least 20 times since 1990.
> For all my published math papers (about 7 of them in 3 different
> peer-reviewed journals)
> I've used MS Word & Design Science's Mathtype, and exported to a PDF.
> My math & physics friends also have never learned TeX. I cannot speak
> for them whether
> they have tried it or not.
>
> Reason I ask: my math & physics friends & I might need to use TeX
> as part of a National Science Foundation grant I am preparing: not for
> the application process at all,
> but for archiving our results.
> But, in spite of thousands of online tutorials & YouTube videos,
> we can never organize & memorize the massive number of commands in
> markup languages
> like TeX.  So, in order for us to do it, we would need to take formal
> college courses in TeX
> and each of us devote several thousand hours learning it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> John Michael Nahay
> 25 Chestnut Hill Lane
> Columbus, NJ 08022-1039
> resolvent at alumni.rutgers.edu
> Home: 609-298-3650
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr Alan Litchfield
AlphaByte
PO Box 1941
Auckland, New Zealand 1140