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\author{Clive Nicholas}
\title{My tuppence ha'penny}
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Jonathan Kaplan wrote:
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Since yesterday been trying Beamer and Latex for the first time, learning Latex seems quite a formidable task, although I just discovered Lyx, which may help.
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I've not yet had cause to try the Beamer package of \LaTeX{} slide tools, but speaking as a \LaTeX{} novice of 15 months or so, my advice is to stick at it. You will (eventually) make some quite sensational-looking documents. I found that the quickest way to learn \LaTeX{} was to indulge in a bit of good old \lq{sex and violence}\rq{}: or, simply, to test your text editor to its limits, and press as many buttons and try out as many commands that you come across as possible to see what, if anything, happens at the other end.
That is not, however, to say that you shouldn't read around the subject, as I'm sure you will. The best quick and free sources for my \LaTeX{} education have been \emph{The Not So Short Introduction to \LaTeX2e{}}, the current version of which should be available at \url{CTAN:/tex-archive/info/lshort}, and Robin Fairbairns' UK \TeX{} FAQ pages at \url{http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq}. I strongly advise you to buy the complete, four-volume, \LaTeX{} Companions Revised Set, published by Addison-Wesley, as well. I bought mine for just \pounds{64} at ReadMore (\url{www.swotbooks.com}).
In any case, your \LaTeX{} proficiency will be quicker once you've produced some test articles (in the \lq{article}\rq{} class). I've now produced three documents varying from 4 to 21 pages, the trickiest of which involved trying to output a large outline map of England that I pulled off the Interweb on one page. I was screaming for mercy at several points along of the way, and wasted huge amounts of my time and diskspace downloading Adode Photoshop on finding the solution. The solution itself, using Acrobat, is \underline{very} simple!
After 15 months, I can now also:
\begin{itemize}
\item process documents in different fonts (New Century Schoolbook is probably the nicest to look at);
\item format \lq{resultsset}\rq{}-style tables (although even when you think you've cracked the art of tables, \LaTeX{} has a habit of biting you on the bum);
\item include Stata-generated graphs \emph{and} drop \lq{tags}\rq{}
which automatically refer to which page the graph is on (but you can,
however, with just about any \LaTeX{} object);
\item to place captions anywhere I like for all of my tables and graphs;
\item compile numbered and bullet-point lists (much like this, in fact);
\item do footnotes;\footnote{but they're very easy to do!}
\item print algebraic equations to my specfication \emph{and} with tabbed and indented keys for the equation directly below each one (listen carefully to what Kit Baum has to say about the advantages of doing equations in LaTeX over MS Word: very informative);
\item output a bibliography to my \emph{exact} house-style of choosing;\footnote{I also recently learned how to run \BibTeX{}, which formats your references
that you store in a seperate .bib file, but in my view, this is a complete waste of time: ask me privately, and I'll tell you why.}
\item last, but not least, \LaTeX{}'s best feature, again in my view: a quick command to generate a table of contents. I've also recently learned how to include the bibliography section in this! Again, if you want to know how, you know what to do.
\end{itemize}
All that, and I'm a complete thickard with no prospects. So imagine how much you'll learn using \LaTeX{}. Good luck!
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