Hey, this isn't *exactly* programming, but it's markup anyhow, and I figure somebody here can probably help me.

I'm learning LaTeX to make putting together a calculus portfolio more interesting. (plus it'll look better than anyone else's who did the whole thing in pencil.) What I want is to put a subject heading centered across the top, the majority of the page in two columns, and an afterthought spanning the whole width of the page at the bottom. I'm currently acheiving this using \twocolumn with a \makebox at the beginning and a \begin{tabbing} at the end of the first column.

FYI, this is in pdfTeX v pi-1b, if it matters.

I'm slowly figuring out how to use \makebox, the "tabbing" environment, \twocolumn, and the $ operator-whatever in combination with those, but I have some questions about how to manipulate layout. I've of course fixed most of the problems I had when i started this post, but still:

- What's the right way to put in a carriage return inside a
\makebox statement?
- Can I specify text colors?

I may have more as i start trying to get this to look somewhat decent...At some point i have to learn how to do right-aligned tabs from left-aligned text. (hopefully that's not too ugly or impossible)

I'm not familiar with custom layout things in general, but the ways that I know for getting line breaks where none appear the usual way are:

\\
or
\vspace{.1in} (or some other amount of space)

As for colors, mathematicians think in black and white. Don't be a deviant. ;-)

hey, TeX _is_ programming...it is not a mere document markup language like HTML! You can have if/then, looping constructs, functions, etc. To use color you want (searches the tetex manual) the ... oh my, this is amazing ... color package. And then rtfm. You might also want to use colortbl for colored table background and colortab for I forgot what (something to do with tabs :-). Like Psion said you use \\ to insert a newline without creating a new paragraph. If you are using Debian, the tetex manual is in the tetex-doc package (and the docs are in /usr/share/doc/texmf/). You might want to take a look in there. I think color is covered briefly in the "Not so short introduction to LaTeX" included in tetex-doc. You should read it if you haven't already.

Latex can be quite difficult to get into, but in my opinion there is nothing sexier than a girl in latex :)

Oh, codered... you make me laugh... ha... ha ..hmmmmm

thanks u_l!

Decided to use miniPage instead of the box thing. It's more predictable... \\ in a box just tabs the next text to right aligned at the margin. No clue why, just doesn't work.

Not Debian: pdfTeX for OS X ... docs are in a different place, but I hadn't thought to look for them until you brought that up. Duh.

Persistent problem, maybe u_l knows or somebody can point me in the right direction.

\section{Title}
will give me a subject heading in the document, and also make a listing in the TableOfContents... but it's numbered.
\section*{Title}
will get rid of the number -- but also the TOC listing!

is there a happy medium?

If you are new to LaTeX and dont have time , energy , to learn use AbiWord to output you a .latex file , the latex it into dvi.

-Easy Way.

sorry infryq, but I don't really know that much about LaTeX (I've only used article mode for my article for Free Software Magazine [better finish revising that...] and a short essay). Never really messed with the report template.

the easy way? that's for wimps :)
anyhow, i have the time *and* the energy. Even though the gal who sits next to me looks at me like I'm nuts when she sees I have everything typed. Ah well... learning TeX definitely has its advantages. and like anything remotely close to the linux community, it's documented like nothing else. I'm just going to stop asking questions here, because all i do is go and solve them within the next twenty minutes. sigh.

Fair enough - I too learned LaTeX , but I need a guide to help me with it :). If you are after quick code ,AbiWord is good !

-Vlaf