[Tex/LaTex] Which books can I read via texdoc

booksdocumentationtexdoc

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

  1. free,
  2. on my system, and
  3. 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:

  1. Name of book
  2. texdoc invocation
  3. Which main distributions is it in (TeXLive? MikTeX?)
  4. 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":

  1. 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 as texdoc lshort in TeX Live
     
    Not 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".

  2. Knuth's “TeX82” (= "TeX: The Program"). Invoke as texdoc tex in TeX Live.

  3. "TeX for the Impatient” (2003) by Abrahams, Hargreaves and Berry. Invoke as texdoc impatient/book.pdf in TeX Live. Also available in French as texdoc impatient-fr/fbook.pdf.

  4. "A Few Notes on Book Design" (2009) by Peter R Wilson. Available as texdoc memdesign in TeX Live. Whilst originally part of the memoir 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.

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