calc: About This Manual
1.2 About This Manual
=====================
This document serves as a complete description of the GNU Emacs
Calculator. It works both as an introduction for novices and as a
reference for experienced users. While it helps to have some experience
with GNU Emacs in order to get the most out of Calc, this manual ought
to be readable even if you don’t know or use Emacs regularly.
This manual is divided into three major parts: the “Getting Started”
chapter you are reading now, the Calc tutorial, and the Calc reference
manual.
If you are in a hurry to use Calc, there is a brief “demonstration”
below which illustrates the major features of Calc in just a couple of
pages. If you don’t have time to go through the full tutorial, this
will show you everything you need to know to begin. 
Demonstration
of Calc.
The tutorial chapter walks you through the various parts of Calc with
lots of hands-on examples and explanations. If you are new to Calc and
you have some time, try going through at least the beginning of the
tutorial. The tutorial includes about 70 exercises with answers. These
exercises give you some guided practice with Calc, as well as pointing
out some interesting and unusual ways to use its features.
The reference section discusses Calc in complete depth. You can read
the reference from start to finish if you want to learn every aspect of
Calc. Or, you can look in the table of contents or the Concept Index to
find the parts of the manual that discuss the things you need to know.
Every Calc keyboard command is listed in the Calc Summary, and also
in the Key Index. Algebraic functions, ‘M-x’ commands, and variables
also have their own indices.
You can access this manual on-line at any time within Calc by
pressing the ‘h i’ key sequence. Outside of the Calc window, you can
press ‘C-x * i’ to read the manual on-line. From within Calc the
command ‘h t’ will jump directly to the Tutorial; from outside of Calc
the command ‘C-x * t’ will jump to the Tutorial and start Calc if
necessary. Pressing ‘h s’ or ‘C-x * s’ will take you directly to the
Calc Summary. Within Calc, you can also go to the part of the manual
describing any Calc key, function, or variable using ‘h k’, ‘h f’, or ‘h
v’, respectively. Help Commands.
The Calc manual can be printed, but because the manual is so large,
you should only make a printed copy if you really need it. To print the
manual, you will need the TeX typesetting program (this is a free
program by Donald Knuth at Stanford University) as well as the
‘texindex’ program and ‘texinfo.tex’ file, both of which can be obtained
from the FSF as part of the ‘texinfo’ package. To print the Calc manual
in one huge tome, you will need the Emacs source, which contains the
source code to this manual, ‘calc.texi’. Change to the ‘doc/misc’
subdirectory of the Emacs source distribution, which contains source
code for this manual, and type ‘make calc.pdf’. (Don’t worry if you get
some “overfull box” warnings while TeX runs.) The result will be this
entire manual as a pdf file.
Info Catalog
calc: What is Calc
calc: Getting Started
calc: Notations Used in This Manual