Cheap Tex Unbound: Latex & Tex Strategies for Fonts, Graphics, & More (Book) (Alan Hoenig) Price

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Customer Reviews of Tex Unbound: Latex & Tex Strategies for Fonts, Graphics, & More

It is quite apparent, to me anyway, that the author has a love of typography and you'll find lots of examples and hints for good "typographic style".

The book abounds with examples of what is possible -- if you think "TeX = Maths only", think again. As this book shows, TeX is about fine typesetting -- whether mathematical or straight text.

It is, as others have commented, quite an eclectic mix of topics, but, for me, one topic makes the book's price worthwhile -- the coverage of MetaPost (John Hobby's graphics programming language). MetaPost is a little "tricky" to learn, so the fact that the author devoted a whole chapter to it (Chapter 13 -- some MetaFont too), is what made me buy the book.

Personally, I would like to see more MetaPost at the expense, perhaps, of some of the more exotic font material, but that's a personal preference. The MetaPost examples are well chosen, and well explained. If this book comes out in a second edition, I'd ask the author to (at least) double the size of the MetaPost chapter -- good introductory information on MetaPost programming is very hard to find :-(. Publishers, please publish a book about MetaPost!

Overall, this is not the sort of book you'd read in one sitting, but you'll certainly find yourself dipping into it on a regular basis to make use of the wealth of ideas, tips + tricks.

Nice one Professor Hoenig, but more MetaPost, please :-)

Best discussion on TeX/LaTeX and fonts yet
I'll agree that this book is a bit of a hodgepodge of issues on the TeX/LaTeX typesetting systems. One of the various topics covered, however, and as I recall it's also the most extensive part, is a comprehensive discussion on one of the most arcane of all TeX issues, that of fonts. Even after many years of experience as a fairly advanced end user, I realized, while reading that book, that there were, to my shame, countless details I had up-to-now failed to _really_ understand. The discussion on the use and installation of type-1 fonts alone, to my mind, is well worth the price.

The discussion on graphics, while interesting, cannot obviously be compared to the definitive work by Goosens, Rahtz et al., but it doesn't take anything away from my general appreciation: it's one of the few books on TeX/LaTeX in recent memeory that made me feel I was actually learning something I didn't know. Hoenig makes a point of using a rich, fluent, and extremely acurate prose which further enhances the reading enjoyment.

Is it a beginner's book? Is it an advanced text? I dunno.
I'll admit I'm just a LaTeX junkie who doesn't have a lot of time for plain TeX commands. I picked up this book because it looked as though it had some LaTeX stuff on fonts in it, and I was bored. Once again, I had recently skimmed my way through Knuth's "TeX Book" in yet another ill-fated effort to motivate myself to learn some plain TeX commands. ("\hsize" in TeX, "\hspace" in LaTeX--oh, I'll just confuse myself.) The short Appendix in this book (for which Hoenig is way too apologetic) which starts the reader out on TeX was much more fun to read, and I immediately sat down, picked up Knuth's bible to use as a reference, and re-coded some of my LaTeX documents into plain TeX, all the while muttering, "This isn't too onerous. Hmmmm, maybe in a couple of weeks I'll write my own TeX style set." The LaTeX Appendix is less successful as a primer, but that's okay because you aren't really buying this book for the appendicies. Or are you? The rest of the work deals with advanced topics regarding fonts and graphics and is set forth in lucid fashion with a good and concrete discussion of the NFSS. (Why is it that most of these TeX/LaTeX books are so vague and nebulous concerning fonts? This book proves that you can concisely write about TeX fonts without forcing the reader to read between the lines or piece together nuggets of wisdom from multiple sources.)

Sure, it's geared toward advanced TeX users, I think. But LaTeX afficianados should give it a look or at least buy it and photocopy that little Appendix to pass around to friends.