General ⇒ Help for a beginner

[jmmmp]

Hi,

I'm a beginner, and have no experience whatsoever with latex. I wanted to create a musical score, comprised of a mixture of several files to import. That is:

- the document is 150 pages long, page size is 297 x 466 mm (portrait)
- the contents of each page are *only* either 3 or 6 pictures. these take over the *whole* page. (with "whole page" I mean really the whole paper surface. margins et al were already made in the documents to be imported) So, each page is divided into 3 or 6 (almost similar) parts.
- the format of the pictures to be imported can be either pdf or tif, as long as they can provide good quality and resolution (1200dpi) - actually I would like to use pdf, if possible. So basically, this document is a juxtaposition of other documents I've made on another program.
- final output must be a pdf

What I wanted to ask was:
- I've heard that latex was a good, efficient and workable way of achieving my goal - which is to produce a good quality product. is it true? Won't there be any side effects of importing other material, or graphic downgrading?
- I don't really have the time or budget to start learning latex to do it on myself. Would it be possible for someone just to make a .tex file with the commands for the 1st 2 pages (that is, 1 full page + page break), and I'll get it myself going afterwards?
- I am actually interested in knowing Latex, but the tutorials I saw weren't really that nice - more made for people that have no other choice in learning it, as for someone who is curious, and really needs to learn from scratch. Or is it really just that complicated?

My system is windows xp. I just installed Miktex 2.7, which I believe is the most current version.

Thanks a lot for your replies,

jmmmp

[Hans Nieuwenhuis]

Latex can be difficult for a beginner, but that depends on the kind of document he/she wants to make. If you want to use MS Word for example to get the same quality result, then I think MS Word is more difficult than Latex.

Including graphics is easy: use \includegraphics

You say that you don't have much time to learn Latex....that's a pity: if you would have time and are serious in making music with Latex, have a look at MusiXTeX and 'abc2mtex'.