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Hi Matt:
It's pronounced Lah (or Lay) Tek. There are some TeX-heads out there who will
argue vehemently for one or the other.
I have just begun a subscription to this list, and I can tell you what LaTeX
is. At its lowest level, it isn't pretty, and has a fairly steep learning
curve. Commands and text are entered into the document, and then it's
compiled. It is, however, device independent. It's primarily a mathematical
typesetting language built upon a root language called TeX. Your math
department can undoubtedly show you what it looks like. It does not easily
convert to any standard document package, such as Frame or Word, that I know
of, because you would have to strip out all of the typesetting commands
included in the root LaTeX file. The final output of a LaTeX file is a dvi
page, which can be printed by a postscript printer. The dvi page can be, and
often is, imported as a graphic into other word processing packages, so unless
you actually understand the LaTeX language, you are out of luck.
Therefore, I would ask this potential employer if the LaTeX document consists
primarily of text and graphics, or is there a lot of scientific notation
involving Greek letters, subscripts, superscripts, symbols, insane matrices,
long, lined-up equations, etc. If it's primarily text and graphics, conversion
wouldn't be too difficult. But if it contains scientific notation, you would
probably have to reset the type for these sections, or, again, perhaps paste
them in as graphics. Good luck!
As far as indexing is concerned, there is the American Society of Indexers
with a web page that might give you some pointers at http://www.missouri.edu/~libnh/ASI/reading.htm, which will at least point you
in the general direction of indexing.
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