TeX for the Impatient
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This is version 1.0 of the free edition of the book TeX for the Impatient, released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Primary distribution point: ftp://tug.org/tex/impatient aka http://tug.org/ftp/tex/impatient/. It is also available from any CTAN node at /tex-archive/info/impatient. TeX for the Impatient is also a GNU project, and the original sources are available there.
Information about the free edition is included at the end of the preface and on the copyright page. The book was originally published by Addison-Wesley in 1990; we (the authors) regained the rights in 2003 and made it available under the GFDL.
We'd be interested in hearing about any projects undertaken with this material. See /errata.future for some relatively small ideas for enhancements. Our email address: impatient@tug.org.
Some random thoughts for people thinking of working with the source:
- You may want to translate the source into some more standard format; we used many homegrown macros to make typing and markup easier.
- You may also want to redo the index creation to use makeindex or some other standard program, instead of our homegrown Icon programs [index1.icn|index1.icn] and [index2.icn|index2.icn] (included in the distribution, for what it's worth). Until the index can be easily regenerated, the page breaks can't change without the index becoming useless.
- Printing the GFDL required many kludges, a true Eplain-compatible version is needed (which in turn would require using the current eplain to print the book).
Happy TeX'ing.
