26 Jul
2018
26 Jul
'18
12:38 p.m.
On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 14:22:20 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
That's the case now, I assume. I've just dragged out the TeXbook
(February 1989), LaTeX user's guide and reference (referring to LaTeX
2.06 (April 1986)) and "TeX for the Impatient" (1990). None of them
mention this command, and after 20 minutes of searching I wasn't able
to find any reference in any of them to any font family except CM, and
thus also no way to change to one. About the only titbit I found was
that you needed separate commands for each font at each size, and that
this was impractical. A far cry from troff's .ps command.
You may be used to an earlier version of LaTeX (LaTeX 2e?).
Things are considerably better now. I didn't use LaTeX much
for over a decade but now, with editors such as TeXWorks and
faster machines, rendering is quite fast. There are also some
webbased TeX editors that are quite good (and show rendered
page in one pane). Many more fonts are available now. And
there is plenty of help available at tex.stackoverflow.com.
For short simple documents I generally use MarkDown or
AsciiDoc. Their light markup means source files are quire
readable in a terminal window, and they still render well to
an html page or pdf (and you can include images). For more
complex editing tasks I switch to LaTeX (or XeLaTeX). And
Unicode has helped for Indic scripts. I don't have to use
transliterated Roman with diacritics for Indian languages
(hard to read/write in this form for a native speaker).