\chapter*{Preface}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Preface}

This is the book accompanying a \LaTeX{} course for first-year
econometrics students at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. The aim of
the course is to guide you through your first steps with \LaTeX{},
with pointers to additional \LaTeX{} resources to further your
\LaTeX{} skills.

Some topics are delegated to appendices because they did not fit
in with the course. Consult them as needed.  There is
an accompanying downloadable zip file with sample code.

The second chapter deals with practicalities. It gives some hints
how you can set up your own \TeX{}
environment, and also introduces the \TeX{}
installation of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

The \TS{} editor used in the course is free, cross-platform and has
palettes of mathematical symbols. This last feature is useful for
\LaTeX{} beginners who have to typeset a lot of mathematics, or at
least for their teacher. But most of this book is editor-agnostic,
and the launcher, see below, makes it easy to switch editors.

\section*{The university installation and the \TL{} launcher}

A few words about our local setup: the university's \TL{}
installation resides on the network. It includes a launcher with
menu entries for the various components of the installation. Upon
first use the launcher does some necessary initialization, such as
adjusting the searchpath and setting up file associations. You can
rerun this initializer at any time if something seems messed up.

The current incarnation of the launcher is written in a
Windows-specific scripting language AutoIt. I am slowly rewriting it
in C. In the new version, it will be possible to define the menu and
other details in a configuration file; making it easy to adapt the
launcher to other setups. I hope to publish it eventually in some
form.

The launcher replaces an earlier initialization script which created
a menu and file associations, and added \TL{} to the user
searchpath. It consisted of a batch file / Perl script combination
which made use of the built-in Perl of \TL. A version is available
at \url{www.tug.org/texlive/w32client.html}.
