TeX Therapy

Confessions of a LaTeX author

I've been writing scientific/technical articles, manuals, books, slides for more than 30 years, and I've not only seen many mistakes being made when typesetting documents, but I've also commited quite some LaTeX offenses myself.

Throughout the years, I've built a list of dos and don'ts. As I find myself getting irritated ever more by seeing bad LaTeX, I felt I could no longer be the observational bystander. I needed to act. When speaking to one of my colleagues about how irritated I was by the bad LaTeX around me, he encouraged me to turn my anger into a positive vibe, and share my knowledge. That's how the idea grew to make a TeX Therapy site.

You will find that the articles (I call them 'therapy sessions') are short, and I like it that way. I know you are all busy doing more important stuff than typesetting. If you just could spend five minutes of your time to read my short advice notes, whenever you can spare five minutes, the world could benefit from it in the form of better (formatted) texts.

I appologize for the die hards amongst you who think 'TeX' is an inappropriate shorthand for LaTeX. I agree. And still, I call these pages 'TeX' therapy. The principles in them also hold for plain TeX.

Structure of the site

So far, I did not put any structure into the articles. The more I gather of them, the more I will be compelled to order them. Let's see how long it takes before I reorganize.

Please, collaborate!

Do you have a question that I might address in a therapy session? Let me know!

Are you irrated by some bad LaTeX practice yourself? Let me know. We might co-author a short therapy session on it.

And now, stop wasting your time reading this intro, and start taking your first session!