Douglas.Miller@viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller) (01/11/91)
In article <D957A82E48DF20011F@FHCRCVAX.BITNET>, JOE@FHCRCVAX.BITNET (Joe Meadows) writes: > I'm trying to convince some of our staff that TeX (or VAX Document) would be > the way to go for our documentation, however I'm not knowledgable enough in > either to figure out something that sounds like it should be pretty trivial. > > I'm looking for a simple way to be able to create a wide_verbatim > environment, which would support 132 columns (perhaps more?). This sounds > trivial, but my first two days of learning TeX hasn't uncovered an obvious > way of doing it. Tomorrow I start glancing through the DOCUMENT manuals to > see what it offers.. You should use LaTeX or DOCUMENT, not TeX, as you then have access to predefined document formats and document structuring tags (but from your comments it seems you have been experimenting with LaTeX not TeX anyway). To get 132 columns you will need to reduce the character size and/or reduce the margins. For example, if you you are using LaTeX and you change to 8pt prior to starting the verbatim environment, I calculate you will need a text width of 7.8in. At this width it would be better to outdent the verbatim on the left and right, rather than making the rest of the text so wide. As you apparently have DOCUMENT already, I would strongly recommend you try it out first, as it is supposed to be a fully featured documentation system, with a wide range of document styles. LaTeX wins on price, but does have a sizable DIY component if you need something different to one of the small number of standard document styles (as you have probably just discovered)
eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout) (01/12/91)
Douglas.Miller@viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller) writes: >You should use LaTeX or DOCUMENT, not TeX Using LaTeX is using TeX. You probably mean 'plain TeX'. No one uses pure TeX (perhaps Vax Document dumps that. I don't know). Victor.
maschler@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL (MICHAEL MASCHLER) (01/14/91)
u> <1991Jan11.174901.6071@csrd.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@shum.huji.ac.il Reply-To: maschler@vms.huji.ac.il Organization: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Lines: 21 News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1 Apparently-To: post-usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu In article <1991Jan11.174901.6071@csrd.uiuc.edu>, eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Vi ctor Eijkhout) writes... >Douglas.Miller@viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller) writes: > >>You should use LaTeX or DOCUMENT, not TeX > >Using LaTeX is using TeX. You probably mean 'plain TeX'. >No one uses pure TeX (perhaps Vax Document dumps that. I don't know). > >Victor. I would like to take issue with the last statement: I use AMSTEX quite regularly, which is very convenient to type mathematical texts, and I plan to add to it Lams-TeX, which enables one to add Latex features to AMSTEX. However, almost in any paper that I write, there are needed parts that cannot be done by these packages (or can only be done with great difficulty and awkwardly. In such cases I always switch to plain.tex. Judging from the many questions I see in comp.text.tex and other places, of the type "how do you do this and that in Latex?" I would answer -- switch to plain TeX. Michael