Learning how to use TeX for automatic layout of non-technical documents

Question

Whenever I try to learn more about TeX or LaTeX, I am stymied by the general bias of the books and online resources I have seen, and possibly by the bias of LaTeX itself. I am not interested in using TeX to typeset books, articles, slides, or journal publications. Instead, I would like to use it for documents that other programs generate. These documents are not of a technical nature.

For example I have a system written in Haskell that takes cooking recipes and generates grocery lists. I need to generate printed output for the recipes and the grocery lists. This of course is not a book or article, and because the output is being generated automatically I don't care about separating presentation and content. Instead my main concern is making the printed output look good. So far I am using roff for this because I have never managed to figure out how to use (La)TeX for something like this.

Another thing that I would like to write is a simple system to take checklists written with very little markup and transform them to a good two-column layout for printing.

What good resources exist for learning (La)TeX if you do not want to write a long structured technical document? It seems that TeX is a typesetting program like roff, so it should be possible to use it for things like this, but I don't know where to start learning. Everything I read starts out with how to write an article.

Answer 1

The question is general, but the cited example is pretty specific. Separation of form and content is actually very useful if the documents are generated automatically. In your case, I think a 'master file' plus 'content file' makes the most sense. Have your list generated as plainly as possible, call it grocery-list.tex (say), and make it look like this:

% grocery-list.tex
\item Apples
\item Oranges
\item ...

Then you want simply to \input that file into another one that controls the formal layout of the page. You could do something like this (let's call this grocery-master.tex):

\documentclass[12pt, oneside]{article}
% does a grocery list require indented paragraphs?
\parindent 0pt
% set encoding stuff
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}%
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}%
% pick a font:
\usepackage[fulloldstylenums,largesmallcaps]{kpfonts}%
% maximize space for text given there is no need for
% any header or footer in a grocery list
\usepackage[margin=2cm,noheadfoot]{geometry}
% probably want a two-column layout
\usepackage{multicol}

% you actually do want to separate form and content,
% even if (especially if?) you are generating the document
% from another program. Here is one simplistic example
\newcommand{\headlinefont}{\large\bfseries\sffamily}
\newcommand{\headline}[1]{%
  \begingroup\headlinefont% <-- now all content generated by the \headline command will be the same
  #1\endgroup}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}

\headline{My <whatever> list}

\begin{itemize}

\input grocery-list.tex

\end{itemize}
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

Only you will be able to decide what a 'good two-column layout for printing' looks like, but this should get you started. For customizing lists, I recommend the enumitem package. For fancier font stuff, remove the first three \usepackage lines, replace with \usepackage{fontspec}, pick your fonts, and use either the LuaTeX or XeTeX engines (commands: lualatex or xelatex). There is also ConTeXt instead of LaTeX, which would be ideal for this sort of thing (I think); hopefully someone posts a simple example for you to try. For specific questions related to specific issues, simply ask more (i.e., new) questions on this site.

Cookbooks would definitely be more complicated, but the same principles apply.

Answer 2

Your question is rather general, so also an answer is.

Learning how to write an article (without mathematics) is a good starting point to more advanced forms. Then you can easily use, e.g., packages for recipies: A cookbook in LaTeX?. Here http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2006 (Halina Wątróbska, Ryszard Kubiak, From XML to TeX, using Emacs and Haskell) you can find an example of using Haskell and LaTeX to obtain a dictionary of Old Church Slavonic language.