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From: "Robert F. Beeger" <5beeger@informatik.uni-hamburg.de>
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Subject: Re: Wanting to learn plain TeX
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 19:57:25 +0200
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Hi!

Thanks for the tips to Hans and Marcus.
I'll take a look on some of this books in the near future.

And maybe I'm also going to read the TeX-Book itself.
I've read some positive reviews of it at amazon.de.
I'd thought Knuth's books to be full of ununderstandable math and 
typesetting Chinese.
Maybe I'll give it a try.

Greets
     Robert

At 14:03 31.08.00 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
>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
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                                                   Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
>                       Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
>  tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------