TEX

#redirect TeX

TeX

[[Image:TeX lion.png|thumb|The TeX mascot, by Duane Bibby]] T_EX, written as TeX in plain text, is a typesetting system Computer programming by Donald Knuth. It is popular in academia, especially in the mathematics, physics and computer science community. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatter, in many Unix installations. TeX is generally considered to be the best way to typeset complex mathematical formulas, but, especially in the form of LaTeX and other template packages, is now also being used for many other typesetting tasks. == The name and its pronunciation(s) == A homage to Caltech, where Knuth received his doctorate, the name TeX is intended to be pronounced "tekh", where "kh" represents the sound at the end of Scottish English ''loch'' or the name of the German composer ''Johann Sebastian Bach'' (in International Phonetic Alphabet ). The X is meant to represent the Greek alphabet letter χ (chi (Greek letter)). TeX is the abbreviation of τέχνη (technē), Greek for "art" and "craft", which is also the source word of ''technical''. English speakers often pronounce it "tek", like the first syllable of ''technology''. The name is properly typeset with the "E" below the baseline; systems that do not support subscript layout use the approximation "TeX". Fans like to proliferate names from the word "TeX" — such as TeXnician (user of TeX software), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. == History == Knuth began to write TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental ''The Art of Computer Programming''. In a manifestation of the typical hacker urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978, but the language was not frozen until 1989, more than ten years later. Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of 1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX. When Steele returned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology that fall, he rewrote TeX's I/O to run under Incompatible Timesharing System. The first version of TeX was written in the SAIL programming language to run on a PDP-10 under Stanford University WAITS operating system. For later versions of TeX, Knuth invented the concept of literate programming, a way of producing compilable source code and high quality cross-linked documentation (typeset in TeX of course) from the same original file. The language used is called WEB and produces programs in Pascal programming language. TeX has an idiosyncratic software version. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptote approaches pi. The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features. == The typesetting system == TeX commands commonly start with a backslash and are grouped with curly braces. However, almost all of TeX's syntactic properties can be changed on the fly which makes TeX input hard to parse by anything but TeX itself. TeX is a macro and token based language: many commands, including most user-defined ones, are expanded on the fly until only unexpandable tokens remain which get executed. Expansion itself is practically side-effect free. Tail recursion of macros takes no memory, and if-then-else constructs are available. This makes TeX a Turing-complete language even at expansion level. The system can roughly be divided in four levels: in the first characters are read from file and assigned a category code. Combinations of a backslash (really: any character of category zero) followed by letters (characters of category 11) or a single other character are replaced by a control sequence token. In this sense this stage is like lexical analysis, although it does not form numbers from digits. In the next stage, expandable control sequences (such as conditionals or defined macros) are replaced by their replacement text. The input for the third stage is then a stream of characters, including ones with special meaning, and unexpandable control sequences, typically assignments and visual commands. Here characters get assembled into a paragraph. TeX's paragraph breaking algorithm works by optimizing breakpoints over the whole paragraph. After the paragraph is broken into lines, the vertical list of lines and other material is broken into pages. The TeX system has precise knowledge of the sizes of all characters and symbols, and using this information, it computes the optimal arrangement of letters per line and lines per page. It then produces a DVI (TeX) file (for "device independent") containing the final locations of all characters. This dvi file can be printed directly given an appropriate printer driver, or it can be converted to other formats. Nowadays, PDFTeX is often used which bypasses DVI generation altogether. Most functionality is provided by format files (predumped memory images of TeX after large macro collections have been loaded). Common formats are Knuth's original basic plain TeX, LaTeX (ubiquitous in the technical sciences), and ConTeXt (which is used primarily for Desktop Publishing). The ultimate reference works for TeX are the first two volumes of Knuth's Computers and Typesetting, ''The TeXbook'' and ''TeX: The Program'' (which includes the complete documented source code for TeX). TeX is usually distributed together with Metafont, a companion program also developed by Knuth which allows algorithmic description of fonts. The organisation of the directories in a TeX / Metafont installation is standardized in a tree called ''texmf''. == License == The license allows free distribution and modification, but demands that any changed versions must not be called T_EX, TeX, or anything confusingly similar. The American Mathematical Society has registered a trademark for T_EX. A test suite called the TRIP test has been made to help testing whether an implementation is really a T_EX. == Quality == TeX is written in WEB, a mixture of documentation written in TeX and a quite restricted Pascal subset. For example, TeX does all of its dynamic allocation itself from fixed-size arrays. As a result, TeX has been ported to almost all operating systems (usually by using the web2c converter). Knuth offers knuth reward check to people who find and report a computer bug in it. The award per bug started at $2.56 and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. This has not made Knuth poor, however, as there have been very few bugs and in any case a cheque proving that the owner found a bug in TeX is usually framed instead of cashed. == Computer-science aspects of TeX == The TeX software incorporates several interesting algorithms, and has led to a number of theses of Knuth's students. For instance, a hyphenation algorithm (work by Frank Liang) is used that assigns priorities to breakpoints in letter groups. A list of hyphenation patterns can be generated automatically from a corpus of hyphenated words. The line breaking algorithm is an example of dynamic programming. The problem of breaking a paragraph of n words into lines has a naive complexity of 2ⁿ, but with dynamic programming a globally optimal layout can be derived in time proportional to the number of words and the number of words per line. A thesis by Michael Plass shows how the page breaking problem can be NP-complete because of the added complication of placing figures. The companion program Metafont for character generation uses Bezier curves in a fairly standard way, but Knuth devotes lots of attention to the rasterizing problem on bitmapped displays. Another thesis, by John Hobby, further explores this problem of digitizing "brush trajectories". This term derives from the fact that Metafont describes characters as having been drawn by abstract brushes. == Derived works == Several document processing systems are based on TeX, notably: * LaTeX (Leslie Lamport TeX), which incorporates document styles for books, letters, slides, etc., and adds support for referencing and automatic numbering of sections and equations, * ConTeXt, written mostly by Hans Hagen at [http://www.pragma-ade.com Pragma] is a professional document designing tool based on TeX. It's much younger than LaTeX and therefore maybe less popular than its older brother, but much more powerful. * AMS-TeX, produced by the American Mathematical Society, this has a lot of more user-friendly commands, which can be altered by journals to fit with the house style. Most of the features of AMS-TeX can be used in LaTeX by using the AMS "packages". This is then referred to as AMS-LaTeX. The main AMS-TeX manual is entitled ''The Joy of TeX''. * jadeTeX which uses TeX as a backend for printing from James Clark (XML expert)'s DSSSL Engine, * Texinfo, the GNU documentation processing system. * XeTeX is a new TeX engine that supports Unicode and the advanced Mac OS X font technologies. Numerous extensions and companion programs for TeX exist, among them BibTeX for bibliographies (distributed with LaTeX), PDFTeX, which bypasses dvi and produces output in Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format, and Omega (TeX), which allows TeX to use the Unicode character set. All TeX extensions are available for free from CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. == Compatible tools == On Unix-compatible systems (including Mac OS X), TeX is distributed in the form of ''teTeX''. On Microsoft Windows, there is the ''MiKTeX'' distribution and the ''fpTeX'' distribution. The TeXmacs text editor is a WYSIWYG scientific text editor that is intended to be compatible with TeX. It uses Knuth's fonts, and can generate TeX output. LyX is a similar tool. == TeX and MediaWiki == As of 2003, the MediaWiki wiki software (as used on Wikipedia) implements Wikipedia:TeX markup, using <math>...</math> tags enclosing blocks of TeX. This capability is implemented via Texvc which is basically a script that pipes the markup through TeX, then dvips to produce a PostScript file which Ghostscript renders into a PNG image. Due to the nature of the web environment, this is done in an efficient (cached) and security-conscious way – allowing third parties to pass unsanitised text through the standard TeX engine is a bad idea if you value your files. The example fragments of TeX below are rendered using Texvc, and simple ones such as $a \over b$ can be used to generate

a \over b

, although it is recommended that one write the HTML-rendered ''a''/''b'' instead. == Examples == A simple plain TeX example - Create a text file ''myfile.tex'' with the following content: hello \bye Then open a command line interpreter and type tex myfile.tex TeX then creates a file ''myfile.dvi'' Use a viewer to look at the file. MikTeX for example contains a viewer called Yap (computer program): yap myfile.dvi The viewer shows ''hello'' on a page. ''\bye'' is a TeX command which marks the end of the file and is not shown in the final output. The dvi file can either be printed directly from the viewer or converted to a more common format such as PostScript using the dvips program. Alternatively portable document format-files may be created directly, using pdfTeX: pdftex myfile.tex pdfTeX was originally created because converting generated PostScript into PDF resulted in poor font display, though printing performance was fine. This was because TeX natively uses bitmap fonts, which are only designed to display well at one particular size, whereas PostScript typically uses scalable Type 1 fonts. It is now possible to make dvips output scalable fonts with a bit of tweaking (newer versions of Ghostscript support it), but direct conversion to PDF has other benefits: it is a one-step, not two-step process, and pdfTeX provides facilities such as bookmarks and hyperlinks not found in PostScript. === Mathematical examples === To see TeX further in action, look at its formatting of mathematical formulas. For example, to write the well-known quadratic equation, try entering The quadratic formula is ${-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over {2a}}$ \bye Use TeX as above, and you should get something that looks like :The quadratic formula is

{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over {2a}}

Notice how the formula is printed in a way a person would write by hand, or typeset the equation. In a document, entering ''mathematics mode'' is done by starting with a $, then entering a formula in TeX semantics and closing again with another $. Display mathematics, or mathematics presented centered on a new line is done by using $$. For example, the above with the quadratic formula in display math: The quadratic formula is $${-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over {2a}}$$ \bye renders as :The quadratic formula is

{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over {2a}}

=== LaTeX examples === LaTeX is a collection of macros written in TeX. There are many predefined templates (with predefined styles) one can use. It is much more structured than TeX, providing a set of macros and utilities for indexing, tables, lists and so forth. For example: \documentclass[a4paper]{book} \begin{document} \section{ ... a title } \subsection{ ... a subtitle} %% The text goes here \end{document} To render the book as a PostScript file, use latex myfile.tex dvips myfile.dvi Alternatively, one way to render the book as a PDF file is pdflatex myfile.tex ==Application software for TeX== * Winshell * LyX * Kile * TeXnicCenter ==References== ==See also== *Metafont *MetaPost *List of document markup languages *Comparison of document markup languages *[http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~mimi/tex/tex-refcard-letter.pdf Plain TeX Quick Reference (PDF)] ==External links== * m:Help:Formula * [http://www.tug.org/ The TeX users group] * The UK TeX Users' Group [http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yes FAQ] * [http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS_L_About.php Getting started with LaTex] at Art of Problem Solving * [http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/tex/texnotes.ps Simon Eveson, ''An Introduction to Mathematical Document Production Using AmSLaTeX'']
a PostScript file * [http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/ Mac OS X TeX/LaTeX Web Site] * [http://sciencesoft.at/index.jsp?link=latex&lang=en Online LaTeX] for converting online TeX to a PNG graphic * ConTeXt: [http://contextgarden.net The ConTeXt wiki] and [http://www.pragma-ade.com Homepage at Pragma] ===Software=== * [http://www.ctan.org/ Comprehensive TeX Archive Network]: Repository of the TeX source and hundreds of add-ons and style files. * [http://omega.enstb.org/index.html Omega] (16 bit version of TeX; includes ''lambda'' version of LaTeX) * [http://www.toolscenter.org TeXnicCenter] (a feature rich integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000/XP) freely available under GPL.) * [http://www.texmacs.org/ GNU TeXmacs Scientific Editor] * [http://www.chikrii.com Chikrii Softlab] (Word2Tex and Tex2Word) * The [http://www.tug.org/texlive/ TeXLive] distribution is said to be an easy start for beginners. It includes a multiplatform DVD which contains basically all of CTAN. For Windows users it includes fpTeX (see below). * [http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html TeXShop] - a free TeX editor for Mac OS X (with syntax coloring and Cocoa spellchecking) * [http://www.miktex.org/ MiKTeX] – MiKTeX (pronounced mick-tech) is an up-to-date implementation of TeX and related programs for Windows (all current variants) on x86 systems. * [http://www.fptex.org fpTeX] – fpTeX is an up-to-date port of tetex for Windows. ===Books=== * Donald E. Knuth, ''The TeXbook'' (Computers and Typesetting Volume A), Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1984. ISBN 0201134489. The [http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/tex/texbook.tex source code of the book in TeX] is available online on CTAN. It is provided only as an example and its use to prepare a book like The TeXbook is not allowed. * [http://www.eijkhout.net/tbt/ Victor Eijkhout, ''TeX by Topic'']: Freely (''as in beer'') downloadable programmer's reference * [http://tug.org/ftp/tex/impatient/ ''TeX for the Impatient''], a more tutorial book, now licensed under GFDL. * [http://makingtexwork.sourceforge.net/mtw/ Norman Walsh, ''Making TeX Work'']: Free online book * [http://texikon.artiverse.net/ Stefan Schwarz and Rudolf Potucek, ''TeXikon'']: (German) online reference work documenting over 1400 TeX and LaTeX commands. This website derives from an out-of-print book published by Addison-Wesley in 1996 as ISBN 3893196900. Free software Macro programming languages TeX Typesetting vi:TeX

TeX

#redirect Meta:Help:Formula

TeX

TeX (usually written TeX in plain text) is a typesetting system writing by Donald Knuth, which is popular in academia, especially in the mathematics, physics and computer science community. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatter, in many Unix installations. Typesetting software Typesetting programming languages Markup languages

TeX

The pronunciation help is wrong. please cf. http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ipachart_cons_pulm_fbmp3.html TeX derives from Greek techn� and that is NOT pronounced with an IPA [x] or ['chi'] but with the fortis palatal fricative - IPA ["c with a diacritical ' at its bottom"]. So TeX is not pronounced like 'loch' or GER 'Bach' but like GER 'mich' or GER 'Technik'. What do people think of adding a picture that illustrates the "spelling" of TeX, similar to the one at the beginning of the LaTeX article? –User:Matthew Low 09:56, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) :I like the lion better :) Pity the thumbnailer makes it so faint... anyone know how to manipulate the original to fix that? User:Lupin 10:43, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC) ::You could simply ask the copyright holder of the image (User:Oneiros). It would have been nice if I'd been asked before the inclusion of the image here anyway. :-( -- User:Oneiros 13:57, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC) :Knuth writes in the TeXbook: "It's the `ch' sound in Scottish words like ''loch'' or German words like ''ach''; it's a Spanish `j' and a Russian `kh'." I understand this as a clear description of [x], not [�]. Perhaps Knuth belongs to the 99% majority of people who never heard about palatalization in Greek. -- User:EJ 13:50, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::Update: I just checked [http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/harry/lan/grphdetl.htm The Details of Modern Greek Phonetics and Phonology]. Although it discusses Greek palatalization in depth, it nowhere suggests that consonants are palatalized ''after'' a front vowel, or when separated from the following front vowel by another consonant. Indeed, examples of velars in such a position show them unpalatalized: έχω [`εxo], γεγονός [ʝεγon`os], λίγο [ʎ`iγo], γυναίκα [ʝin`εka], προσεκτικά [prosεktik`a], κλείνω [kʎ`ino]. Thus, AFAICS, there is ''not'' a single reason why TeX should be pronounced with [�]. Can someone who is both native Greek and a trained phonetician confirm that τεχνη is pronounced [tεxɲi]? -- User:EJ 15:34, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC) :::Surely the question is not how it might be pronounced in Modern Greek (Ancient Greek would in any case have been different), but how it's pronounced in English, on which Knuth is surely something of an authority. By the way I've converted the spelling guide to IPA, which is the Wikipedia standard, as well as being less ugly to look at adn probably less confusing. User:Ross Burgess 19:56, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::::I agree. The point was that even if someone disagrees with this viewpoint (such as, apparently, the anonymous first poster), it makes no sense to use an ich-laut. ::::BTW, I reverted the change you did in the sentence "The name is properly typeset ...", it was wrong. TeX is properly typeset either with a lowered capital "E" (preferred), or normal lowercase "e", but not with lowered lowercase "e". -- User:EJ 13:34, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Just to be clear here, are we talking about the Voiceless uvular fricative or the Voiceless velar fricative? User:213.112.81.180 15:56, 15 May 2005 (UTC) :::Velar. The question was whether it is velar or palatal. User:EJ 09:05, 17 May 2005 (UTC) :::: But German ach-laut certainly can be uvular. Is that the only example in Knuth's list that can be [χ] instead of [x]? User:213.112.81.40 14:04, 17 May 2005 (UTC) ::::: Hmm, I see. Russian [x] is definitely not velar. As for Spanish and Scottish (i.e., any of the at least 3 different languages or language varieties which could have been meant by this adjective), I don't know the languages myself, but all descriptions of their phonetics I've seen agree on [x], the uvular fricative [χ] not being even mentioned. ::::: The discussion starts to get funny, I think it is time to use some common sense. There's no indication whatsoever that Knuth is a trained phonetician, and that he is aware of the differences between the various fricatives located near velum. In any case, the description he gives in TeXbook is not intended as an exact phonetical definition, but to give general (mostly North American) public a clue that the name is not to be pronounced [tɛk]. Inferring anything more from the description is of dubious value. -- User:EJ 13:18, 18 May 2005 (UTC) :::::: So I guess the conclusion is that you can use either one, and Knuth didn't make the distinction. User:213.112.81.22 18:07, 18 May 2005 (UTC) ::::::: You can of course use whatever you want, as usual. It's just that the article should indicate some reasonable default pronunciation. -- User:EJ 10:21, 19 May 2005 (UTC) ---- Please avoid using the TeX logo when you cannot print it properly as in HTML. If you want to have the logo, upload a bitmap. – User:Bronger 12:18, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC) : Lovely. But it's not a logo, it's the properly formatted form of its name (''comme'' "iTunes", not "ITunes" or "Itunes" or something else). Reinstated. : User:Jdforrester User_talk:Jdforrester 14:34, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC) ::Vertical displacement is not part of orthography. Moreover it looks ugly in many browser configurations and inserts an enlarged line skip. All of this is unnecessary. Finally, in his book "Digital Typography" Knuth himself insists on a thorough positioning of the logo letters according to the current typeface. This is obviously not at all possible in HTML. – User:Bronger 08:54, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC) ::Moreover, the current form in the article is really weird: The last letter seems to have been typed as a Greek letter, but the first two haven't. Anyway, if no real reason against it is given, I'll switch back to the plain version in the article. – User:Bronger 23:56, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC) ---- I am not too convinced about the section TeX#TeX examples. Do we really want to write this section as a tutorial, with the "hello" code, the details of commands to type to compile the source, etc ? I prefer the way the MetaPost article does it: provide one relatively complex source code, along with the result it produces when compiled. Opinions ? User:Schutz 01:04, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) :I think that's a good idea. – User:Bronger 17:31, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) :Seconded. <disclaimer> I wrote MetaPost. 8-) </disclaimer> Maybe two similar short documents, one plain TeX, one LaTeX with the sample output from one or both of them. There are quite a few short example documents around (e.g. Lamport's sample.tex or others from a TeX distribution or off the web) that could be used for inspiration -- preferably giving a single small page (e.g. A5 paper). Not every feature of TeX/LaTeX needs to be included -- just enough to demonstrate the principles and maybe the differences between plain & La. User:AndrewKepert 08:23, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC) :I have had a first go at a LaTeX version. It is A4, but 12pt. See User:AndrewKepert/TeX sample User:AndrewKepert 10:04, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC) == Licence == To 83.135.160.19: TeX is not in public domain, it is copyrighted by Knuth. Here is the licence notice: % This program is copyright (C) 1982 by D. E. Knuth; all rights are reserved. % Copying of this file is authorized only if (1) you are D. E. Knuth, or if % (2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy. (The WEB system provides % for alterations via an auxiliary file; the master file should stay intact.) % See Appendix H of the WEB manual for hints on how to install this program. % And see Appendix A of the TRIP manual for details about how to validate it. % TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. % METAFONT is a trademark of Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. User:EJ 10:02, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Tex

#REDIRECT TeX

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