Advanced printing/layout tools

[Doug Poland]

On 2010-01-01 14:18, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 07:36:25PM +0100, Polytropon wrote:
>> On Fri, 1 Jan 2010 19:24:21 +0100, Roland Smith<rsmith at xs4all.nl>  wrote:
>>> If the material is more than one page (which I suspect is the case her), a
>>> tabular environment for the complete list isn't such a good choice.
>>>
>>> It would be a better idea to use a tabular environment for every single
>>> entry. That way, every entry becomes a "box" for LaTeX to sort out how to fit
>>> on a page
>>
>> That's a very good advice - I needed to do that, too.
>> A tabular environment that grows larger than page height
>> won't be truncated automatically. The smaller the "parts"
>> of your document are ("boxes" that represent paragraphs,
>> tabulars, figures etc.), the more easily LaTeX can manage
>> them. In nearly every case, LaTeX does it right.
>>
>> An option is to check how many entries fit onm one page
>> (or one column of the page) and then let awk count them.
>> If the amount is reached, the tabular is \end'ed, the
>> page / column break is given, and a new tabular is
>> \begin'ed.
>
> Stacking boxes is TeX's job. And you should let it do that, because it is a
> lot better at it than awk will ever be. ;-)
>
>>>> be installed, e. g. with "pkg_add -r teTeX". Of course, you
>>>> stay in the free land of open source with this combination.
>>>
>>> I prefer the TeXLive distribution, but that is a matter of taste I guess.
>>
>> As far as I know, TeXLive cannot be installed automatically
>> via FreeBSD's ports / packages subsystem.
>
> No, but installing it is easy. You mount the cd/dvd (image) and run
> 'tlinstall.sh'. The latest TeXLive comes with FreeBSD i386 and amd64 binaries.
>
> The only thing is that you have to modify the ports (such as aucTeX) that
> require TeX to point to the right bits. It's manageable.
>
> Roland
 >
Thanks for the info so far.  I have much to learn about LaTeX, that is 
certain.  To complicate matters, the output will be on US Letter, 
landscape, multi-column, multi-sided, booklet format.  No doubt LaTeX 
will handle the landscape, letter, and multi-column, but I'm not sure 
about booklet, multi-sided.  I have some experience with print/psutils 
doing duplex, booklet printing.


-- 
Regards,
Doug