A word processor is a computer Application software used for the production of any sort of printable material.Word processor may also refer to an obsolete type of stand-alone office machine, popular in the 1970s and 80s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a dedicated computer for th... for the TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact... typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on paper or some other Recording medium. Before the advent of desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by compositors or typesetters working by hand, and later with machines.... program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as .
LaTeX is most widely used by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, philosophers, scholars in academia
Academia
Academia, Academe, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.... and the commercial world, and other professionals.
A word processor is a computer Application software used for the production of any sort of printable material.Word processor may also refer to an obsolete type of stand-alone office machine, popular in the 1970s and 80s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a dedicated computer for th... for the TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact... typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on paper or some other Recording medium. Before the advent of desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by compositors or typesetters working by hand, and later with machines.... program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as
.
LaTeX is most widely used by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, philosophers, scholars in academia
Academia
Academia, Academe, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.... and the commercial world, and other professionals. As a primary or intermediate format (e.g. translating DocBook
DocBook
DocBook is a Semantics markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation.... and other XML-based formats to PDF), LaTeX is used because of the high quality of typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on paper or some other Recording medium. Before the advent of desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by compositors or typesetters working by hand, and later with machines.... achievable by TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact... . The typesetting system offers programmable desktop publishing
Desktop publishing
Desktop publishing combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either Publishing or small scale local Multifunction printer output and distribution.... features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout and bibliographies
Bibliography
Bibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology .... .
LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level language that accesses the power of TeX. LaTeX essentially comprises a collection of TeX macros and a program to process LaTeX documents. Because the TeX formatting commands are very low-level, it is usually much simpler for end-users to use LaTeX.
LaTeX was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport
Dr. Leslie Lamport is an United States computer science. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he received a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, and Master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in mathematics from Brandeis University, respectively in 1963 and 1972.... at SRI International
SRI International
SRI International, founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in the United States, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.... . It has become the dominant method for using TeX—relatively few people write in plain TeX anymore. The current version is LaTeX2e (styled ).
The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to create a document in LaTeX, a .tex file must be created using some form of text editor
Text editor
A text editor is a type of software application used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code.... . While many text editors work, many people prefer to use one of several editors designed specifically for working with LaTeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact... .
The LaTeX Project Public License is a software license originally written for the LaTeX system. Software distributed under the terms of the LPPL can be regarded as free software, however it is not copylefted.... (LPPL), LaTeX is free software
Free software
Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware... .
The typesetting system
LaTeX is based on the idea that authors should be able to focus on the content of what they are writing without being distracted by its visual presentation. In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using familiar concepts such as chapter, section, table, figure, etc., and lets the LaTeX system worry about the presentation of these structures. It therefore encourages the separation of layout from content while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed. This is similar to the mechanism by which many word processor
Word processor
A word processor is a computer Application software used for the production of any sort of printable material.Word processor may also refer to an obsolete type of stand-alone office machine, popular in the 1970s and 80s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a dedicated computer for th... s allow styles to be defined globally for an entire document or the CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including Scalable Vector Graphics and XUL.... mechanism used by HTML
HTML
HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '... .
The example below shows the LaTeX input and corresponding output:
\documentclass[12pt]
\usepackage
\title
\date
\begin
\maketitle
\LaTeX is a document preparation system for the \TeX
typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing
features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of
typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and
cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies,
and much more. \LaTeX was originally written in 1984 by Leslie
Lamport and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few
people write in plain \TeX anymore. The current version is
\LaTeXe.
% This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output.
% The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX
\begin
E &= mc^2 \\
m &= \frac
\end
\end
LaTeX can be arbitrarily extended by using the underlying macro language to develop custom formats. Such macros are often collected into packages, which are available to address special formatting issues such as complicated mathematical content or graphics. Indeed, in the example above the align environment is provided by the amsmath package.
Pronouncing and writing "LaTeX"
LaTeX is usually or in English (that is, not with the pronunciation English speakers normally associate with X
X
X is the twenty-fourth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled ex , plural exes .History... , but with a ).
The characters T, E, X in the name come from capital Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE.... letters tau
Tau
Tau is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 300. This letter in English is pronounced , but in Modern Greek, this letter's name is pronounced .... , epsilon
Epsilon
Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a close-mid front unrounded vowel /e/. It is also the primary letter used in Real Analysis.... , and chi
Chi (letter)
Chi is the 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet, pronounced as [kai] in English. Its value in Ancient Greek was an aspirated voiceless velar plosive .... , as the name of TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact... derives from the (skill, art, technique); for this reason, TeX's creator Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer science and Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.Author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming , Knuth has been called the "father" of the run-time analysis, contributing to the development of, and systematizing formal mathematical techn... promotes a pronunciation (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative
Voiceless velar fricative
The voiceless velar fricative, informally known as the hard ch, is a type of consonantal sound used in some Speech communication languages.... as in Modern Greek, or the last sound of the German word "Bach", similar to the Spanish "j" sound). Lamport, on the other hand, has said he does not favor or discourage any pronunciation for LaTeX.
The name is traditionally printed with the special typographical logo
Logo
A logo is a graphical element that, together with its logotype form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo's design is for immediate recognition.... shown at the top of this page.
In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced in running text, the word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX to avoid confusion with the word "latex
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and Word processor for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as .... ". The TeX, LaTeX and XeTeX
XeTeX
XeTeX is a TeX Typesetting using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType or Apple Advanced Typography. It is written and maintained by Jonathan Kew and distributed under the MIT License.... logos can be rendered via pure CSS
The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.... for use in graphical web browser
Web browser
A Web browser is a application software which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network.... s following the specifications of the internal \LaTeX macro.
Licensing
LaTeX is typically distributed along with plain TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact... . It is distributed under a free software license, the LaTeX Project Public License
LaTeX Project Public License
The LaTeX Project Public License is a software license originally written for the LaTeX system. Software distributed under the terms of the LPPL can be regarded as free software, however it is not copylefted.... (LPPL). The LPPL is not compatible with the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.... , as it requires that modified files must be clearly differentiable from their originals (usually by changing the filename); this was done to ensure that files that depend on other files will produce the expected behavior and avoid dependency hell
Dependency hell
Dependency hell is a colloquial term for the frustration of some software users who have installed Software package which have dependency on specific Software versionings of other software packages.... . The LPPL is DFSG
Debian Free Software Guidelines
The Debian Free Software Guidelines is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian.... compliant as of version 1.3. As free/open source software, LaTeX is available on most operating systems including Unix
Unix
Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna.... (including Linux
Linux
Linux is a generic term referring to Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Their development is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone under the terms of the GNU GPL license... and the BSDs), Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces .... , Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a line of computer operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc., and since 2002 has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems.... , RISC OS
RISC OS
RISC OS is a computer operating system which was originally developed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England for their ARM architecture based computers.... and AmigaOS
AmigaOS
AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000.... .
As a macro package, LaTeX provides a set of macros for TeX to interpret. There are many other macro packages for TeX, including Plain TeX, GNU Texinfo, AMSTeX, and ConTeXt
Context
Context may refer to:* ConTeXt, a macro package for the TeX typesetting system* ConTEXT, a Windows text editor* Context , the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation and discourse... .
When TeX "compiles" a document, the processing loop (from the user's point of view) goes like this: Macros > TeX > Driver > Output. Different implementations of each of these steps are typically available in TeX distributions. Traditional TeX will output a DVI
DVI (file format)
The Device independent file format is the output file format of the TeX typesetting program, designed by David R. Fuchs in 1979. Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not intended to be human-readable; they consist of binary file describing the visual layout of a document in a manner not reliant on any specific , c... file, which is usually converted to a PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas.... file. More recently, Hàn Th? Thành
Hàn Th? Thành
H?n Th? Th?nh was the original author of pdfTeX, which he used as a vehicle for his doctoral study on microtypography at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, which he completed in 2000.... and others have written a new implementation of TeX called pdfTeX
PdfTeX
The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Donald Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by H?n Th? Th?nh as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno.... , which also outputs to PDF and takes advantages of features available in that format. The XeTeX
XeTeX
XeTeX is a TeX Typesetting using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType or Apple Advanced Typography. It is written and maintained by Jonathan Kew and distributed under the MIT License.... engine developed by Jonathan Kew merges modern font technologies and Unicode with TeX.
Computer Modern is the family of typefaces used by default by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his METAFONT program, and was most recently updated in 1992.... , which gives default documents created with LaTeX the same distinctive look as those created with plain TeX.
Versions
LaTeX2e is the current version of LaTeX. , a future version called LaTeX3, started in the early 1990s, is still in development. Planned features include improved syntax, hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink, usually shortened to link, is a directly followable reference within a hypertext document.The area from which the hyperlink can be activated is called its anchor; its target is what the link points to, which may be another location within the same page or document, another page or document, or a... support, a new user interface, access to arbitrary fonts, and new documentation.
There are numerous commercial implementations of the entire TeX system. System vendors may add extra features like additional typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs.... s and telephone support. LyX
LyX
is a document processor following the self-coined "what you see is what you mean" paradigm , as opposed to the WYSIWYG ideas used by word processors.... is a free
Free software
Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware... visual document processor that uses LaTeX for a back-end. TeXmacs is a free
Free software
Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware... , WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG , is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even the lighting for a theatrical event.... editor with similar functionalities as LaTeX but a different typesetting engine. Other WYSIWYG editors that produce LaTeX include Scientific Word on MS Windows.
A number of TeX distributions are available, including TeX Live
TeX Live
TeX Live is a TeX software_distribution which is advertised as the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart TeTeX .TeX Live has been developed since 1996 by collaboration among the TeX user groups worldwide, including the TeX Users Group.... (multiplatform), teTeX
TeTeX
teTeX is a TeX software distribution for Unix-like systems. As of May 2006 teTeX is no longer actively maintained and its former maintainer Thomas Esser recommended TeX Live as the replacement.... (deprecated in favour of TeX Live
TeX Live
TeX Live is a TeX software_distribution which is advertised as the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart TeTeX .TeX Live has been developed since 1996 by collaboration among the TeX user groups worldwide, including the TeX Users Group.... , Unix), fpTeX (deprecated), MiKTeX
MiKTeX
MiKTeX is a TeX/LaTeX distribution for Microsoft Windows that is developed by Christian Schenk.Significant features of MiKTeX are its ability to update itself by downloading new versions of previously installed components and packages, and an easy installation process.... (Windows), MacTeX
MacTeX
MacTeX is a software distribution of TeX Live. While TeX Live is designed to be cross-platform , MacTeX includes Mac-specific utilities and front-ends.... , gwTeX (Mac OS X), OzTeX (Mac OS Classic), AmigaTeX (no longer available) and PasTeX (AmigaOS) available on the Aminet
Aminet
Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' File Transfer Protocol sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web.... repository.
Context may refer to:* ConTeXt, a macro package for the TeX typesetting system* ConTEXT, a Windows text editor* Context , the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation and discourse...
DocBook is a Semantics markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation....
Kile is a TeX/LaTeX text editor providing a user friendly environment to edit TeX/LaTeX source code. It runs on Unix-like systems including Mac OS X and Linux with the Qt libraries installed.... free open source LaTeX editor (Linux, KDE)
LaTeX-Editor is a freeware development environment for the production of LaTeX and TeX documents under Windows. It has among other things an auto-completion when inserting instructions, spell verification with thesaurus, integrated DVI preview, code wrapping and the most important LaTeX symbols and instructions can be reached via toolbar but... free development environment for the production of LaTeX and TeX documents under Windows
is a document processor following the self-coined "what you see is what you mean" paradigm , as opposed to the WYSIWYG ideas used by word processors.... free open source GUI based editor that uses LaTeX for typesetting
The New Typesetting System is a reimplementation of TeX in Java. The specific aims of the project were to continue the tradition of Donald Knuth's TeX by providing a first-class typesetting software which is both portable and available free of charge.... NTS - a TeX reimplementation (discontinued)
TeXnicCenter is a free software open source Integrated development environment for the LaTeX typesetting language. It uses the MiKTeX or TeX Live distributions.... free open source LaTeX editor (Windows)
WinShell is a freeware, closed-source multilingual software integrated development environment for LaTeX and TeX for Windows developed by Ingo H.... A free multilingual integrated development environment (IDE) for LaTeX and TeX
