LaTeX Musings
Before I get in to this blog, I should note that this will form one of several entries on LaTeX.
When we first started the Journal of Maps we decided to typeset the material ourselves and pondered for quite a while about which software to use. Whilst DTP software first sprang to ming (e.g. InDesign), these are not wholly designed for free flowing text, but rather short, styled, pieces. What we really wanted was software for typesetting and some hunting around the internet pointed me in the direction of LaTeX. This is a version of TeX which adds many macros to allow “ordinary” users to access the true typesetting power of TeX. Tex is nicely summarised by Wikipedia as “a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typeface, it was designed with two main goals in mind: first, to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and, second, to provide a system that would give the exact same results on all computers, now and in the future.”
The source code is in the public domain and there are serveral versions available across many platforms. Whilst for typesetting the output is excellent, because TeX will remain essentially unaltered, code from 1985 should work without problems in 2085. One only has to look at early DOS Word Processor programs, or indeed the BBCs Doomsday Project, to see how quickly file formats can date. This shouldn’t be an issue with TeX.
So at JoM we had settled on the software to use. We then had to pick a distribution, platform and design a template. To keep things short for the moment, I’ll just note that we use Windows XP and settled on LaTeX, which meant going for a version called MiKTeX. And this does everything we want it to!