Re: Wanting to learn plain TeX

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Hi Robert,

>I'm reading this mailing list since April, but I must confess that I'm not 
>understanding a whole bunch of the postings that were made on it.
>
>I asked myself for the reason and found out that all this posting that I 
>don't understand make a great use of plain Tex, which I don't really know.
>I used LaTeX and then converted to ConTeXt, which both in their own ways 
>take away the pain to cope with plain TeX from the user.
>
>But as I see it, the really cool things in ConTeXt have to be done with 
>plain TeX or with ConTeXt and plain TeX.
>So I decided to learn TeX at its roots.
>
>Does someone know a good hands-on book about TeX. Or is the TeX-Book by 
>Knuth still the best one available?

I think that most of the questions you refer to have to deal with specific
wishes and features. In most cases not so much plain tex is needed. But,
because you can hook in your own macros, in order to make your own designs,
a bit of low level tex does not hurt. You can already do a lot when you
know what a hbox, vbox, hfil, vfil, hskip and vskip is. I could encapsulate
those in macros but that will not change the basics. 

I can recomment 'the beginners book of tex from levy and seroul', from
'springer verlag', since it covers what you need to know if you want to go
beyonds context (and latex) basic functionality. A copy of the tex book is
always worth its money while tex by topic from victor eijkhout is a good
reference. 

Hans 
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