banko@moskva.ks.uiuc.edu (Brad Banko) (05/19/91)
Hi. I am just diving into tex/latex from the nroff/troff world, and am running into a lot of what are probably usual frustrations. We have latex/tex installed on Next machines in our group, and i am confused by the seeming lack of online documentation and man pages for tex & latex. there is a man page for tex online, but *not* for latex. Is this usual for tex/latex installations? Also, I have gotten an error message which I can't find in the back of my latex version 2.09 (April 1986) User's Guide. The message is: "! Misplaced \crcr ..." Does this ring any bells? If you can give me a pointer to a newer version of latex (and/or *online* docs (including error messages)), I would really appreciate it. (Also, can one get up-to-date latex source for the User's Guide?) The log file says that our TeX is Ctex Next version 3.1a. (I have the unfortunate luck to be working on a User's Manual, the source for half of which has already been created in latex, but the source for my half I am porting into Latex from nroff. I wrote it in nroff originally so that I could simultaneously create *online* documentation (suitable for even the lowliest ascii terminal) as well as nice typeset text by simply applying "troff or ptroff" to the source instead of nroff. TeX/Latex seems to *lack* the ability to create ascii text output as well as nice typeset output... I realize that tex can do things with fonts, etc. which you *can't* do in ascii, *but* I am of the opinion that worrying about typeset style format, etc. is *not* a scientist's job... it is a job for the typesetter... I don't intend to use Latex any more after this document is finished.) Thanks in advance for your help, and please reply directly to me, since I rarely get a chance to read through this newsgroup. Brad Banko kb8cne -- ============================================================== Brad Banko, Theoretical Biophysics, Beckman Institute Dept of Physics, University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign banko@lisboa.ks.uiuc.edu, (217)-244-1851, 328-4932