[texhax] making brackets

[Susan Dittmar]

Dear Marcia,

Quoting Marcia Beach (m.beach at utoronto.ca):
> I am preparing a linguistics document and I need to make brackets.  I 
> don't have the LaTex program but I understand it works well for this 
> kind of thing.
> 
> Brackets are all that I need to draw.  Can I download the program and, 
> if so, is it easy to make brackets?

this question is difficult to answer without knowing you and without
knowing linguistics well enough for a guess what you could mean with
'brackets'.

If you want to download and install LaTeX, start with
http://tug.org/begin.html -- you should find the install version easy
enough (look out for texlive).

For someone used to some kind of programming, LaTeX is easy to use once you
figure out some basic concepts. Especially it helps greatly if you find a
template which fits to your needs as a starting point.

LaTeX itself is not at all of the "what you see is what you get" approach.
Quite contrary, you tell LaTeX what you want to have and it then uses a
master typesetter's knowledge on how that is exactly to be typeset. There
are some programs that provide the user with a more WYSIWYG work
environment, but I do not have any experience with that. Maybe someone else
can advise you on those.

If I guess right about those 'brackets' -- if you search for the
comprehensive LaTeX symbol list (symbols-a4.pdf), among the first tables
are some phonetic symbol lists and the corresponding commands for use with
LaTeX.

Hope that helps at least a bit,

	Susan