As you know I’m working my way through the Latex Course in Wikibooks. This is partly because I think it is a good course and at the same time trying to see if there are any parts of it which might be difficult for a beginner in Latex. I began by printing the course out (currently 90 pages) and inserting these into a binder which has plastic sheets to hold the pages. Personally I always find it easier to have a course like this printed out while at the same time having it up on line to access the links.

So far, I’ve found the course just as good as I thought it might be apart from the odd trivial spelling error. I played around with it a bit and was easily able to “copy” some of the examples given and then “paste” them into my installed Latex program (MiKTeX 2.5) running on Windows XP.  Then by adding a few standard commands like begin and end document all of the examples I looked at ran with no errors. This sort of procedure is very easy to do and is rewarding and encouraging.
I wonder if there may be a case for making up a Wikibook of our own called say “Latex Examples” with each page devoted to a particular environment (document, report and so on) and this time putting in whatever commands are needed to complete the example and have each example run with no errors.  At the same time using the % command to add useful comments here and there with the beginner in mind.

If we were to do this and make up such a book we could open with an Introduction explaining very clearly just how to obtain a copy of Latex (on a DVD disk from uktug) and install it on ones own computer (Windows or GNU/Linux) .  I must confess I would have found such a thing very useful when I first began to learn Latex. I envisage the beginner starting here and then going on to look at one or two good textbooks and the wide range of free articles dealing with the subject on the Internet.

This would meet the aims of the (DVD based) project I put forward at our recent annual meeting  but would have the big advantage (suggested by others at the meeting) of being Wiki based so that anyone can add to the number and variety of examples included.

I think this is more or less in line with our recent discussions and I would be interested in your comments.

Alastair