\def\CTAN{\textsc{ctan}} \newcommand{\NW}{Norm} \title{Book Review --- `Making \TeX\ Work'} \author[Malcolm Clark]{Malcolm Clark\\ \texttt{m.clark@warwick.ac.uk}} \begin{Article} \begin{verbatim} @book{Walsh94, title="Making TeX Work", author="Norman Walsh", publisher="O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.", address="Sebastopol, CA", ISBN="1-56592-051-1", pages=483} \end{verbatim} This is truly a niche market book. Until I read it, I didn't realise there was a need for it. Basically it tries to describe the many tools and tool fragments which exist for use with \TeX\ (and \MF). In general terms we are talking of tools available through the Internet, and most probably those available at your nearest convenient \CTAN\ host. It is therefore encyclopedic rather than especially profound. You are unlikely to gain any new insights into the working of \TeX\ and its friends, but you will probably meet lots of new friends, whose existence you never even imagined (I excuse a couple of people from this: almost inevitably our esteemed editor will be aware of everything mentioned here, and probably has a list of other tools which should have been included). Given the nature of the Internet world, and \TeX, this can be no more than a snapshot which is probably already out of date: for example, the IP address for \texttt{ftp.tex.ac.uk} has changed.\footnote{For the curious, it is now 128.232.1.87 --- Editor} The book was first published in April 1994, and by July had been reprinted with `minor corrections'. The reprinted edition was one of the goodies at last year's TUG conference in Santa Barbara. Thank you O'Reilly \& Associates, Inc. \NW{} describes \CTAN\ as `a fully-mirrored anonymous FTP hierarchy on three continents' -- but the three continents are North America, Europe and, er, Europe. He makes the common mistake of equivalencing UK with England. World Wide Web makes an appearance indirectly, rather than as a \CTAN\ supported service (so much easier to use); to be fair he does mention the WWW interface available through O'Reilly's server, \begin{verbatim} http://jasper.ora.com/CTAN/ctan.html \end{verbatim} If you try this \textsc{url}\footnote{If you are confused by all this stuff, help may be at hand. We hope that a future edition of \BV\ will discuss the \TeX\ resources available through World Wide Web, and give some clear pointers, as well as filling in some of the background.}, you will find it would have been better to go straight to \begin{verbatim} http://jasper.ora.com/ctan.html \end{verbatim} You may be concluding by now that we are strongly oriented towards electronic networks. This is true, although \NW{} does list some ways of obtaining distributions through more traditional means. But imagine you wanted to get hold of em\TeX\ or Oz\TeX: \NW{} merely refers you to \CTAN\ for em\TeX\ and omits any contact at all for Oz\TeX. This despite the trailer at the end of issues of TeXhax with details of how to obtain this software on disc. Similarly he seems to have missed the (admittedly fairly recent) \textsc{cd-rom} offerings from both the Dutch-speaking users group and from PrimeTime Software which contain gobs of material useful to those with and without electronic connection -- let's not forget that those of us on SuperJanet are still a minority. Many \TeX\ users still access a network (if they access one at all) over a telephone line, and the thought of downloading all these files, even if you can locate them, is daunting. We are also fairly Unix oriented. This is hardly surprising, given that this is an O'Reilly book, and they have made their name by producing books, which if not 100\% Unix in flavour, are at least very oriented towards Unix and GNU/Free Software Foundation. Thus there is a sort of assumption that you can probably write \emph{Perl}, and fairly readily modify the \emph{Perl} scripts which \NW{} includes. He uses \emph{Perl} because it is a scripting language available on all the platforms he discusses -- Unix, MSDOS (and Windows), OS/2 and the Macintosh. Sadly he doesn't tell me how to get hold of \emph{Perl}. It is this Unix bias which leads him to assert that `Unix is probably the most common \TeX\ platform' and to go on to note that the emphasis of the book is Unix workstations running X11 producing output for PostScript and HP LaserJet printers. \NW{} suggests that his description of \TeX\ is really for the systems administrator who wants to know a bit more about this behemoth which he has been persuaded to let occupy her or his system. The computer naive, or just those wanting to get on with some documents are given scant regard. Although he does include some discussion of MSDOS and of OS/2, this is really because many tools have been ported to these platforms from Unix. The inclusion of the Macintosh is intriguing, but other than ghettoising it by giving it its own exclusive chapter out of the sixteen, it makes little appearance, and the repeated themes of command lines and restricted file names does demonstrate that it was something of an afterthought. The really useful fact of Mac filenames -- that they should not contain a blank space if you hope to use \LaTeX, is omitted. In general, there also seems to be a bias towards \TeX, rather than the more accessible extensions like \LaTeX, although again \NW{} does mention \LaTeX, Lollipop (a little surprisingly) and Texinfo (unsurprisingly, although again demonstrating the Unix bias). I have some misgivings when I start with \NW{}'s description `What is \TeX'. The first aesthetic principle which he ascribes to \TeX\ is: `The right margin is justified' (page~3). Besides being a rather contested aesthetic principle, \TeX\ of course allows you to set ragged right, or ragged left (or even both). He also claims `ladders are avoided'. None of my books on typography mention ladders: I assume them to be equivalent to rivers, and while this is certainly a claim by Knuth \& Plass, \emph{and} I have yet to see rivers created by \TeX, I'm still not convinced of its universal truth. I'm made uncomfortable by the first table (page~9), where among the special characters for plain \TeX, \NW{} suggests using \verb+<+ for !` (the usual recommendation is to access it by \verb+!`+), and \verb+>+ for ?` (usually \verb+?`+). This smacks of the shortcut `it works!' approach which always makes me nervous. He also notes the use of \verb+|+ to obtain an em-dash! I begin to despair. This way lies madness. And why would you want a `lone' tilde character or an underscore in your document? Yes I know they are widely used in Unix for paths in directory and file names, but that's hardly mainstream \TeX\ usage. I would be wary of defining a command \verb+\big+ in plain \TeX\ (as on page 100), since it could easily confuse maths typesetting (try \verb+\big\lbrace+ after you have redefined \verb+\big+). And it must be incorrect to maintain (page 21) that if a document contains `no forward references then it can be formatted in one pass'. If it contains no references at all, yes, this is true, but if there are any references (i.e.~\verb+\label+ commands) the \texttt{aux} file has to be written out fully and read again on the next run to resolve the reference(s). In reality this is hardly a problem. I've never yet been able to write a document in one `pass'. There is always some other reason for having to run \LaTeX\ again. Where it does matter is with a document you either receive, or one you pick up from a server. You have to know to run it \emph{at least} twice, and perhaps more times. Basically, keep running it until \LaTeX\ stops carping. To me a section entitled, `\TeX\ for beginners' contains a bizarre, almost oxymoronic, concept. I no longer believe that you should be taught \TeX, until you have mastered \LaTeX. If you need to go further than \LaTeX, then it is worthwhile finding out how \TeX\ works. Most of us don't really need to know first about macros and registers, far less `token lists' (unless of course we already have a few computer languages to our credit). There also seems to be some confusion in describing what \TeX\ is. \NW{} writes ``\TeX\ allows you to separate markup and layout. Logical divisions in the text (chapters, sections, itemized lists, etc.) are identified by control sequences''. Yes this is true, but it is closer to a description of \LaTeX. On page~14 we have a supposed comparison of \TeX\ and \emph{troff} commands, except the \TeX\ is \LaTeX. In passing, why \emph{troff}? Surely no-one would select \emph{troff} over \LaTeX\ given a free choice. Ten or fifteen years ago, and tied to Unix, maybe there was a contest, but today? Similarly the \TeX\ macros on page 43 are for \LaTeX\ (to be fair, he does say that they are from the \CTAN\ directory \texttt{macros/latex/contrib/misc} so I should have been able to work that one out by myself. If \NW{}'s contention was that to talk of \TeX\ was to imply \LaTeX, I wouldn't mind, but there is just too much jumble here, and I'm getting confused. Am I just quibbling? I don't think so. The seeds of confusion are being sown. Having said all this, I think the book is very useful, and it contains answers to many questions. Just ignore the bits about \TeX\ and concentrate on the tools. It almost answered my query about PFM files and how to convert them to \texttt{tfm}s. Simply by recording where many things are in the \CTAN\ archives is a great boon. I can happily spend all day searching through \CTAN, but my chances of coming across something useful are slim. Now I have a better idea of what is there and my searching is more directed. In some areas \NW\ does go into reasonable detail -- for example the installation of em\TeX, or describing how to use new PostScript fonts in \TeX. He also usefully spends a little time and effort describing how to get pictures into \TeX, describing the problems and pitfalls, as well as actually doing it. It is a useful addition to my library of \TeX\ books, if only because it more easily enables me to answer those `is there a public domain driver for \textit{xxx}?' questions. I'm not sure I enjoy the format very much. Paragraphs without indentation and a paragraph separation of about one line height make me shudder a bit, but many manuals have this sort of form, and maybe that's what \NW\ wanted. I don't think it shows \TeX\ off to advantage, although he did make a real effort by eschewing Computer Modern and using Garamond instead. \end{Article}