TeX is a tool for creating professional quality, typeset pages of any kind. It is particularly good, perhaps unsurpassed, at typesetting mathematics ; as a result, it is widely used in scientific writing.
Some of its other features, like its ability to handle multiple languages in the same document and the fact that the content of a document (chapters, sections, equations, tables, figures, etc.) can be separated from its form (typeface, size, spacing, indentation, etc.) are making TeX more common outside of scientific and academic circles.
Designed by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s, more than a decade of refinement has gone into the program called “TeX” today. The resulting system produces publication-quality output while maintaining portability across an extremely wide range of platforms.
Remarkably, TeX is free. This fact, probably as much as any other, has contributed to the development of a complete “TeX system” by literally thousands of volunteers. TeX, the program, forms the core of this environment and is now supported by hundreds of tools.
This book is for anyone who uses TeX. Novices will need at least one other reference, because this book does not describe the nuts and bolts of writing documents with TeX in any great detail.
If you are new to TeX, there is much to learn. There are many books that describe how to use TeX. However, the focus of this book is mostly at a higher level. After digesting Chapter Chapter 1, Chapter 1, you should be able to proceed through the rest of the book without much difficulty even if you have never seen TeX before. So, if you are a system administrator interested in learning enough about these programs to install and test them for your users, you should be all set. If you are interested in learning how to write documents with TeX, this book will be helpful, but it will not be wholly sufficient.
Why do you need this book at all? Although many individual components of the TeX system are well documented, there has never before been a complete reference to the whole system. This book surveys the entire world of TeX software and helps you see how the various pieces are related.
A functioning TeX system is really a large collection of programs that interact in subtle ways to produce a document that, when formatted by TeX, prints the output you want. All the different interactions that take place ultimately result in less work for you, the writer, even though it may seem like more work at first. Heck, it may be more work at first, but in the long run, the savings are tremendous.
Many books about TeX refer the reader to a “local guide” for more information about previewing and printing documents and what facilities exist for incorporating special material into documents (like special fonts and pictures and figures). In reality, very few local guides exist.
The TeX environment is now mature and stable enough to support a more “global guide.” That is what this book attempts to be. It goes into detail about previewing and printing, about incorporating other fonts, about adding pictures and figures to your documents, and about many other things overlooked by other books.
Because fonts play a ubiquitous role in typesetting, this book is also about MetaFont, the tool that Donald Knuth designed for creating fonts.
Some of its other features, like its ability to handle multiple languages in the same document and the fact that the content of a document (chapters, sections, equations, tables, figures, etc.) can be separated from its form (typeface, size, spacing, indentation, etc.) are making TeX more common outside of scientific and academic circles.
Designed by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s, more than a decade of refinement has gone into the program called “TeX” today. The resulting system produces publication-quality output while maintaining portability across an extremely wide range of platforms.
Remarkably, TeX is free. This fact, probably as much as any other, has contributed to the development of a complete “TeX system” by literally thousands of volunteers. TeX, the program, forms the core of this environment and is now supported by hundreds of tools.
This book is for anyone who uses TeX. Novices will need at least one other reference, because this book does not describe the nuts and bolts of writing documents with TeX in any great detail.
If you are new to TeX, there is much to learn. There are many books that describe how to use TeX. However, the focus of this book is mostly at a higher level. After digesting Chapter Chapter 1, Chapter 1, you should be able to proceed through the rest of the book without much difficulty even if you have never seen TeX before. So, if you are a system administrator interested in learning enough about these programs to install and test them for your users, you should be all set. If you are interested in learning how to write documents with TeX, this book will be helpful, but it will not be wholly sufficient.
Why do you need this book at all? Although many individual components of the TeX system are well documented, there has never before been a complete reference to the whole system. This book surveys the entire world of TeX software and helps you see how the various pieces are related.
A functioning TeX system is really a large collection of programs that interact in subtle ways to produce a document that, when formatted by TeX, prints the output you want. All the different interactions that take place ultimately result in less work for you, the writer, even though it may seem like more work at first. Heck, it may be more work at first, but in the long run, the savings are tremendous.
Many books about TeX refer the reader to a “local guide” for more information about previewing and printing documents and what facilities exist for incorporating special material into documents (like special fonts and pictures and figures). In reality, very few local guides exist.
The TeX environment is now mature and stable enough to support a more “global guide.” That is what this book attempts to be. It goes into detail about previewing and printing, about incorporating other fonts, about adding pictures and figures to your documents, and about many other things overlooked by other books.
Because fonts play a ubiquitous role in typesetting, this book is also about MetaFont, the tool that Donald Knuth designed for creating fonts.
