book-designdocumentationplain-textutorials
I am interested in learning plain TeX especially in
What is the most often used commands for doing those above? At least I have a rough direction to the target.
EDIT 1:
Reading Knuth's book needs much time. I want to be more practical and instant first. Later after grasping the rough and basic understanding, I will read the Knuth's book.
In the unstable version the PGFPlots manual has a section containing step-by-step tutorials. The latest unstable version can always be obtained here: http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/pgfplots_unstable.pdf
On the official PGFPlots Homepage at Sourceforge, there is a link to an introductory talk, which was originally held by the main developer Christian Feuersänger. The link is here: http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/pgfplots_talk_FTUG_2012_final.pdf
The 1 inch offsets come actually from TeX itself, and are kind of a pain because you need to take them into account as late as possible in any calculations.
The paper size is defined in a configuration file (I forget its name), but with PDFTeX, you should be able to use commands \pdfpagewidth (default 210 true mm for A4), and \pdfpageheight (default 297 true mm for A4).
Most relevant settings regarding page layout are:
\hsize for h orizontal size (typeblock width)\vsize for v ertical size (typeblock height)\hoffset for h orizontal offset (offset from 1 inch from left edge of paper)\voffset for v ertical offset (offset from 1 inch from top edge of paper)For spread layout, you can just toggle the \hoffset in the output routine.
Because you define the \hsize and \hoffset, there's no need to define margins, but I guess you could write a macro for counting \hsize and \hoffset based on given margins.
Best Answer
I know only of two:
http://mirror.ctan.org/info/texbytopic/
http://mirror.ctan.org/info/impatient/
You'll find free pdf versions of the books in the directories. If you will be a member of DANTE (Germans TeX user group http://www.dante.de) you'll get a free copy of the book TeX by Topic`. At least for mebers in 2014.