No subject

  Calling everyone who needs to create beautiful documents without wrestling
  with a word processor, especially for complicated or long documents, books and
  brochures. Jumping margins? Mis-aligned tables? Hard-to-maintain indexes? Wild
  page numbering?

  With a lively presentation interrupted for coffee at some point, Denise will
  show what the LaTeX document preparation system is and what it can do. LaTeX is
  the opposite of OpenOffice, AbiWord and others: you tag the plain text and
  compile it, and LaTeX does the formatting for you. LaTeX isn't hard, just
  different!

  Denise will cover:

    * What does LaTeX look like? How do you pronounce it?
    * How does LaTeX work?
    * What is LaTeX good for?
    * What sort of output can it produce?
    * How does Denise use it daily for study and work (fun and profit)?
    * How can you get started? 

There will also be a short intro on 'Author-Friendly Text Processing
Systems' by Dan Shearer:

   A very brief introduction to systems for logically describing what a
   nicely-formatted document should look like. There are many languages for these
   logical descriptions, some of them very popular. This sets the context
   for why the 20+ year-old LaTeX system built on the 30+ year-old TeX system is
   not only alive but very important today. LaTeX is roughly in the middle of a
   spectrum of logical markup languages that sees projects like AsciiDoc and
   friends on one side (very author-friendly) and XML on the other (unintelligible
   to humans.) 


-- 
Dan Shearer
dan at shearer.org