Re: Latex and indexes?

[cindy <cindy -at- AAI -dot- COM>]

>I have never heard of Latex (and I don't think this is a reference to
>prophylactics or gloves) before. Anyone?

One important point I haven't seen mentioned yet about LaTeX is that it's
extensible.

LaTeX is a series of macros built on top of TeX, and one of the things that
both TeX and LaTeX do is let you define more macros.  Documents formatted
using LaTeX could either use the basic macros described in the LaTeX book
(the original is by Leslie Lamport), or it could load several other macro
packages (extensions developed by others and made publicly available) and
use gazillions of user-defined macros as well.

So ask whether the LaTeX document(s) use plain vanilla LaTeX, or if they
require other macro packages and/or use user-defined macros.  Many
conversion packages don't handle anything but the standard macros, or
require that you do some serious mucking about in their innards to handle
other macros (e.g., perl programming or similar hacking).

Being extensible is great for folks writing LaTeX documents, but can add
considerable complexity to dealing with the documents, even if you know
LaTeX very well!

Cindy Loiselle (cindy -at- aai -dot- com)
Amerinex Applied Imaging

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