LaTeX

# A few important notes about LaTeX (All GMs)

- You want to read SIPB's Inessential LaTeX document (dvi, postscript, html). It's short but will give you a good working knowledge of LaTeX. If you haven't used LaTeX much, you probably want to print a copy of this; if your browser pops up a viewer for the postscript you should be able to click a Print button on that, and if not you can download the dvi and send it to the nearest printer with

      dvips -h duplex iLaTeX.dvi

  It's convenient to have a copy around.

- '%' is the latex comment character. If you want to say 50%, type 50\%, or everything after the % will disappear in the output.

- While xdvi is useful for viewing most .dvi, it doesn't understand all the postscript tricks that might be there, such as rotations or graphics inclusions. If xdvi makes it look like such things aren't working, turn it into postscript (`dvips foo.dvi -o foo.ps`) and `gv` that (gv is in the sipb locker).

- latex macros can only have alphabet characters in the name. So \seduction1 is illegal -- use \seductionOne or the like. No underscores, spaces, dashes, or anything else.

- latex macros gobble spaces that follow them. If \foo means "FOO!", then when you say "\foo and bar" you'll get "FOO!and bar". Use empty braces with it to avoid gobbling: "\foo{} and bar" gets "FOO! and bar". If you make your own macros with \newdef (a macro the Template supplies) you can arrange to force this.

- it's a good idea to have a unique string prepended to each class of things. So bluesheet macros all start \B, greensheets \G, abilities \A, characters \C, combat cards \CC, etc -- this prevents you from having a greensheet and an ability card for seduction both trying to use the name \seduction. You don't have to use the conventions the Template comes with, of course, but you should use some conventions.