What tools/advice/methods should I utlize to practice "The TeXbook by Donald Knuth"?

Question

The short question is:

How do I progress with this book? What tools should I download? A step by step explanation would be deeply appreciated ..

The experience I had: Am a computer science student and have read several programming books. I was able to follow through them by practicing and putting effort. One of my recent goals was to learn TeX.

I believed I got the best book to learn -correct me if am wrong- the TeXbook by Knuth himself-. I wanted to make it my friend and spend tens of hours practicing but I could not manage to do it. TeXbook is really a different type of read. It starts right a way with the syntax and doesn’t introduce any tools or software that you need to prepare in order to practice. I knew the book was published before I was even born hence, the tools might no longer be the same so I searched a lot.

The search led me to CTAN and Tug sites where I was able to read lots of materials and develop superficial understanding of what a distribution is? what is macro? . I also read a lot of questions and answers in this site .

What is the difference between TeX and LaTeX?

Eventually I downloaded MikTex distribution I started typing some of the syntax in the second chapter, [Book Printing Versus Ordinary Typing]. I was able to generate my first pdf!!! The book didn’t mention that I need to put \end at the end of the document. I obtained this information from your site.

I continued to chapter 4 where I was stuck with font changing command

chapter 4

controlling font size

\ninerm and smaller\eightrm and smaller \sevenrm and smaller \sixrm and smaller \fiverm and smaller \tenrm

\tenrm Ulrich Dieter, {\sl Journal f"ur die reine und angewandte Mathematik} {\bf 201} (1959), 37–70.

to be {\bf bold} or to {\sl emphasize} something.

\tt this will be in a \bf typewriter font format

\it this is an italic font. I want to learn \rm I get the below error ..

I change the drop down list option to luaTex and the PDF magically generates. magical to me because I have no clue why it is happening : )

I hope you understand the challenge am facing as total clueless beginner. I became frustrated to the point where I stopped trying to practice and just continued reading and absorbing as much as I can in hope that I will be able to understand with time.

Yesterday, I reached chapter 6 Running TeX! Knuth was amazingly funny in this paragraph

OK, let’s suppose that you’re rested and excited about having a trial run of TEX. Step-by-step instructions for using it appear in this chapter. First do this: Go to the lab where the graphic output device is, since you will be wanting to see the output that you get—it won’t really be satisfactory to run TEX from a remote location, where you can’t hold the generated documents in your own hands. Then log in; and start TEX. (You may have to ask somebody how to do this on your local computer. Usually the operating system prompts you for a command and you type ‘tex’ or ‘run tex’ or something like that.) When you’re successful, TEX will welcome you with a message.

There are no diagrams there is no explanation of the underlying concepts. I searched online hoping that somebody has put a step by step tutorial with screenshot but no luck.

Please advise about the tools I should use and how to move forwards with this book

please feel free to attack my learning style to improve it and have better outcome.

Sorry for my English & thanks

Answer 1

Hello, newbie!

In my rather long and somewhat uneducated experience, a feasible way to understand what is going on (and experience TeX as a beginner) goes first through understanding that the program may be considered a hybrid between an interpreter (like Perl or Python) and a compiler (like Pascal or C): the interface is, in principle, interactive, so you put stuff through a console, and after executing the instruction, the program comes back to the input prompt; but the product is always an object, if successful: in this case, your formatted document, in a DVI (device independent) format; nowadays, PDF for the most part.

Second: originally, there were perhaps at least six programs to run and/or master to get into the guts of the system. The typesetter TeX (and its sister font designer MetaFont) came in two flavors, ini and production (and the latter in virgin or preloaded versions; but I'll skip those details): the first did not load anything but itself, and had to be taught to do everything from scratch; but it had the ability do \dump a precompiled memory snapshot as object, which the "production" versions could load automagically as "formats" to save time at initialization. After a not very long but somewhat convoluted history, they both are integrated in today's binaries, and the default behavior is the production system: to enter the "ini" TeX you should tell the compiler to run with the flag "tex -ini", to avoid preloading the precompiled format.

Finally, you need to understand that the object produced with early systems (a file with the extension .dvi) had to be processed through a driver to send the output to the device of choice, screen (ega or vga, for instance) or printer (dot matrix or laserjet, for instance), so you had to run perhaps two different programs to do that: one for the screen and another for the printer.

The development of newer document formats allowed for some normalization in the dvi drivers. A popular one, DVIWin, ran on MSWin, which took care of the screen or printer detailes thereon. Now, for PostScript output, you may run dvips on your console, and then send the output to the PostScript screen driver or printer depending on the system, or save it as a file for further processing. Another driver, dvipdfm produces PDF directly from the original DVI object, so you may view it or print it from the PDF viewer of your choice. Over the course of time, the original engine has been extended to produce PDF directly; but this approach has evolved in several, sometimes parallel, sometimes incompatible systems: PDFTeX, XeTeX or LuaTeX, so you save one step (you don't need the DVI format and drivers anymore) at the expense of deciding which "engine" (typesetter model) you want to use.

Today's systems assume you want to typeset LaTeX documents, not Plain or any other existing formats; so they provide an IDE like the one you see, and the IDE defaults to tell the typesetter to run pdfLaTeX, not Plain DVITeX, in "nonstopmode", more akin to a compiler. This is the case as well with at least one OnLine LaTeX service available, which may save you the pain of trying to install a TeX system on your computer.

So this rather long explanation works as a preface for the simple instructions: if you want to try the experience of Plain TeX, the one described in the TeXBook, from scratch, you may use the IDE or any text editor of your choice, but run the typesetter from a console/terminal (on Windoze, typically cmd) with the command pdftex <filename[.tex]>; this way the program will run pdfTeX in "production" mode, with the (slightly extended) Plain format preloaded, and produce PDF files directly, so you may skip the process of learning how to use dvi drivers for the time being.

Addendum From the statement of your question, I collect now that you may have realized that the TeXbook has a rather steep learning curve, and you may have run a little impatient with this system; so I recommend to you to read the first three sections (chapters) of TeX for the Impatient, which you may find at CTAN. This may give you a good grasp of the whole; and then you may get back and start the TeXbook all over. You may find a tutorial on the early interaction with the system in the first section of A Gentle Introduction to TeX, which is a rather good "manual for self study" for Plain TeX as well.

Good luck, and happy TeXing.