For years, I was faithfully downloading a copy of TeX by Topic whenever I reinstalled my computer. Then I learnt about texdoc texbytopic
and my life got just that smidgen easier. I've just returned from a foray in cyberspace where I wanted to learn about the \mathpalette
command and found TeX for the impatient. One of the exotic fruits I found on that foray was Where can I find an online manual for low-level LaTeX commands? where Martin suggested texdoc impatient
.
On the basis that a book in texdoc
is
- free,
- on my system, and
- at least vaguely approved by the TeX community
if I found myself at a loose end one evening and wanted to curl up with a good book on TeX, the ones in texdoc
seem a good place to start.
But knowing what is there is a difficult task, so I thought that a nice CW list would help us all find something to read on those long winter nights.
I think that this is an obvious CW question (assuming it doesn't get closed) and one organised answer would be better than a load of disorganised ones. What would be useful information to have would be:
- Name of book
texdoc
invocation- Which main distributions is it in (TeXLive? MikTeX?)
- Vague area of coverage
As I intend this to be CW, we can build that up incrementally, so if you know of a book but don't know about distributions, list it and someone can test if it's in their distribution.
One thing to be clear is that this is not for individual packages, even if the documentation is more like a book than anything else.
Best Answer
In addition to "TeX by Topic":
Oetiker's "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2ε" in English. Available in other languages as, for example,
texdoc lshort-german
but these are usually older than the English version. Invoke astexdoc lshort
in TeX LiveNot all language versions are obvious; to get a full list of what's available, at least on linux,
texdoc -l lshort
; as of July 2014, there are over 60 possibilities, of which 17 are marked "The document itself".Knuth's “TeX82” (= "TeX: The Program"). Invoke as
texdoc tex
in TeX Live."TeX for the Impatient” (2003) by Abrahams, Hargreaves and Berry. Invoke as
texdoc impatient/book.pdf
in TeX Live. Also available in French astexdoc impatient-fr/fbook.pdf
."A Few Notes on Book Design" (2009) by Peter R Wilson. Available as
texdoc memdesign
in TeX Live. Whilst originally part of thememoir
class documentation it is now separate from that documentation and is a volume on book design in its own right so I think it can satisfy the criteria for this list.