Books for Latex in greek and documentation usage

Question

Well I have been using Latex for a couple of weeks only, so that I can write in math exchange site. I have some problems and any piece of advice is very welcome.

1. I am Greek and there aren't many books that can help you learn how to use latex. Searching on the internet for every thing can get quite time-consuming. For example I use texmaker and very often I have problems with the babel package and especially the polytonic characters (in simple text, no math formulas). I have bought this book which is very nice for a beginner, it is written by the creator of the first babel package for greek, has many examples, it presents some features that refer to greek, but it is written in 1998 and many things have changed since then (for example for greek we don't use iso-8859-7 anymore). This writer has written other books too, but they are for xelatex.

2. I have some knowledge (I study math so we learn a little bit of python, matlab and a little java, but not something too difficult) around programming so it isn't very hard to learn new things. I would really like to learn how to use the guide that comes with every package of Latex like this, without getting confused. I find different things around the internet and it gets quite difficult to find what is working at the moment.

3. How do you all learn about new features and packages of LaTex?

4. Is there a better latex editor than texmaker for ubuntu 18.04 (maybe this question is for askubuntu site)?

(My english is a little dusty. Sorry for any mistakes.)

EDIT: I leave a link for any greek tex writer

https://www.eutypon.gr/ext-links/index.html

There are also some books for LaTex learning in greek. Their titles:

1.Το πρώτο βήμα στο TEX -Μετάφραση Φιλίππου Δημήτριος (Original: A Gentle Introduction to TEX- Michael Doob) (2000)

2. LATEX: ΕΝΑΣ ΠΛΗΡΗΣ ΟΔΗΓΟΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΚΜΑΘΗΣΗ ΤΟΥ ΣΥΣΤΗΜΑΤΟΣ ΣΤΟΙΧΕΙΟΘΕΣΙΑΣ LATEX-ΣΥΡΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΣ (Εκδόσεις Παρατηρητής) (1998)

3.ΤΟ XELATEX ΓΙΑ ΑΡΧΑΡΙΟΥΣ-ΣΥΡΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΣ, ΔΗΜΟΥ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΟΣ (Εκδόσεις Κλειδάριθμος) (2020)

4.ΨΗΦΙΑΚΗ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ ΜΕ ΤΟ LATEX-ΣΥΡΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΣ (Εκδότης: ΕΠΙΚΕΝΤΡΟ) (2010)

5.(One by greek authors in english) Digital Typography using LATEX. Α. Tsolomitis, A. Syropoulos and N. Sofroniou. Springer Profesional Computing, Springer-Verlag, New York Oct. 2002

6.LATEX: ΓΡΗΓΟΡΑ ΚΑΙ ΑΠΛΑ- Λάζαρος Μωυσής, Τσολάκης Χρήστος ( εκδ. Σοφια)

7. A list that contains some others here

E-books

7.Εισαγωγή στη LaTeX για φοιτητές. (An Introduction to Latex in Greek)

8.Εισαγωγή στο latex2ε

Answer 1

Some suggestions.

Mainly referring to question #2

I suggest getting a book in English introducing Latex. Those will probably be from the early 2000's, and that's good. The book you chose should enable you to get the basic ideas of Latex typesetting quickly, e.g. where it came from with TeX, how macros turned into Latex and so on. I would focus on skimming through, rather than reading from start to finish. Yes, books are better than websites.

Choices may be https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX or with greater level of details "The Latex Companion". But any introductary material should do. Also, spend a search on https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/books .

About #3 here is what I did and still do:

• know, which packages were available in the early 2000's, see above
• probe those packages here, which are interesting for a given purpose, because many times people answer like "yes, that's the old package ... this one is much better and more advanced"
• this makes preselection easier for me, so I can spend more focused time to check those better packages User Manuals from https://ctan.org/

About greek in general I suggest using this groups tag-search, e.g. [greek] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/greek and [babel-greek] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/babel-greek . When reading those questions, it may be a good idea to check the "Related" links to the right. (P.S.: E.g. this question's answer from David may be interesting for you: Is there a package that allows me to write Greek letters without anything else? )

About #4 I'm using Miktex on Windows and I am quite comfortable with it. The biggest benefit for me is that it asks me to install missing packages ... which happens quite frequently when trying posted Latex code here ;-)

Answer 2

More of a comment than an answer so hope nobody minds that I am including opinions/advice too:

1. I tried looking for books in Greek for you but couldn't find any. XeLatex and PdfLatex are quite similar though (happy to be corrected and I am basing this off this old answer) so the books the author has written for XeLatex would still be helpful for you if you wanted to buy them.

2. About the package documentation, use google translate (it has the option to translate PDF documents) to convert them from English to Greek, see these pictures from the reference you linked to:

3. Honestly, I am in Engineering and only learnt about Latex 2 months ago at the end of June (raging with anger nobody told me about it as it is perfect) and now I am confident, know where to look and can even answer other peoples questions. You are in a scientific/mathematical discipline too so you should be able to pick up it quick. My advice and how I learnt quickly was using the memoir documentclass/package, it is heavily documented which is a massive bonus and whilst it is a steep learning curve, it introduces you to packages, how to create table of contents, structuring documents with frontmatter, mainmatter etc although parts of it only apply to memoir. The best way to learn is to expose yourself everyday to Latex (as Bernard said in the comments) and make use of this site (which you already have done), the people here are incredibly helpful.

4. Not sure!

Hope this helps.