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What is TEX?

TEX is a document preparation program for creatingdocuments that are

•

beautiful

•

easy to correct

•

easy to update

•

portable to any machineFor simple papers, the essential commands can belearned quickly, and provide easy ways to create sections(and subsections, and subsubsections) that are automat-ically renumbered, cross-references that have a naturalformat and are easy to enter, and bibliographies that caneasily be formatted in a wide of styles. Beyond theseeasy-to-use commands is a wide range of capabilities todo just about anything necessary for the typesetting of documents from leaﬂets to books, including

•

creating or importing graphics ﬁles

•

making complex tables

•

writing mathematical equations of all types

•

multilingual documents

•

nested lists, either enumerated or bulletedIt is important to note that it is a document prepara-tion system, not a word processor. This aﬀects the userin various ways. For instance,

•

Rather than simply entering text, you enter textand commands to format the text.

•

You can create fully formatted text, if you are writ-ing a book, you can create a ﬁle which can simplybe copied and bound.

Peter Flom

What Is TEX?Prelude.

The Eiffel Tower is perhaps the world’s mostbeautiful radio tower. It adds beauty to a utilitarian func-tion to such a degree that most of us don’t consider itsrole in radio transmission. And indeed, it was created tobe the world’s tallest building for Paris’ Exposition Uni-verselle in 1889. It is an example of the fusion of mod-ern industrial design, a open steel structure, with the hu-man need to create beautiful objects. At a different scale,the Eighteenth Century Windsor chair combines a light,strong beautiful structure to fulfill an everyday need.Books share both the public nature of the Eiffel Towerand the personal aspect of a Windsor chair. Whethera book’s typography transparently supports the text orburdens readability with excess decoration depends onboth the designer and the capability of her typesettingsystem. TEX offers the designer the capability to createbeautiful books that are also highly readable.

Getting Started.

I had known about TEX for twentyyears before I used it for a project. And for years, Icould produce documents that were attractive and usefulwith a word processor—

PC-Write

MS Word

OpenOf- ﬁce

—but did not need the capability to produce booksor pamphlets. After my wife and I became docentsat the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens (

http://www.lazoo.org

), we became involved in various spe-cialities within the docent program. I joined the BotanyCommittee, a small group of docents whose goal is topresent the Zoo’s varied plant collection to patrons. TheCommittee’s chairman mentioned that she and anotherdocent had written a self-guided botanical tour completebotanical illustrations. “How do I get

Word

to includemy drawings and turn this into a booklet?” she asked.“You don’t,” I told her. “You need a typesetting system.”

Oﬀ and Running.

I bought Kopka and Daly’s

Guideto L

T E X

[1], installed TEX and L

TEX from the enclosedCD and tried a few of the book’s exercises. I also licensed

WinEdt

for editing L

TEX documents. This combinationwas suﬃcient for several projects and only upgraded whenI joined the TEX Users Group (TUG) and received up-dated versions TEX.I saved the

Word

ﬁles of the botanical tour as plaintext ﬁles and opened them in

WinEdt

. Next, I scannedthe botanical illustrations and then edited them. Withtext and illustrations available to

WinEdt

, I did a first runand showed the results to the Botany Committee. “Thislooks so professional,” was the initial reaction. Havingseen what was possible, expectations rose and we gener-ated several alternatives for the page layout, fonts, tableof contents and index.Looking at design alternatives helped me clarify myown values. The Eiffel Tower and Windsor chair aremetaphors of what I find attractive: the structure itself should be beautiful and useful. On a printed page, thismeans the placement of text, fonts, titles and illustra-tions without extraneous elements. Viewed as rectangleson the page, the arrangement should be balanced andharmonious. Readability is the primary measure of qual-ity. While layouts are matters of personal taste, there aremany helpful references. The documentation for PeterWilson’s

memoir

class[2] is an excellent overview of bookdesign.

Finale.

After weeks of editing and experimenting withlayouts, we settled on a ﬁnal design. TEX is not a mono-lithic system and can evolve as design goals change. Thisis done by changing document classes and calling vari-ous software packages. There seems to be a package foranything I need, but it’s important to know that develop-ers are often revising and writing new packages that addfeatures.

A Botanical Tour of the Los Angeles Zoo and Botani-cal Gardens

was published in November 2004 and is avail-able in the Zoo’s gift shops. Many docents are using itas part of the tours for schools and other groups. Ear-lier this spring, a Botany Committee colleague showedme a botanical tour booklet from another organization.She pointed to the excellent color photographs, but men-tioned that the coated paper used for the booklet madeit heavier than she liked. She pointed to the page breaks,the index and other features that her now-critical eye im-mediately spotted. I suspect the source of her commentscame from the awareness she developed by seeing whatTEX could do when applied as intended. Bravo

Panthera leo

Joe Hogg

(

Joseph.Hogg@bigfoot.com

)

References

[1] Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly. Guide to L

TEX. Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting.Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, USA, 4th edition, 2004. ISBN 0-201-17385-6.[2] Peter Wilson. The Memoir Class for Conﬁguarable Typesetting User Guide. The Herries Press, NormandyPark, WA, USA, 6th edition, 2004. Available at

http://tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf

What is TEX?

When someone asks you, “What is that word proces-sor you are using?”, have you ever wished you hada one page description to hand them? Here is onesuch brief introduction.Technically speaking, TEX is a computer appli-cation for laying out (“typesetting”) pages of textbased on the text the user has written and other in-structions the user has given. In other words, likethe ubiquitous Word, TEX decides where to splitlines of text, where to start a new page, and so on.TEX was created by the noted computer sci-entist and innovator in computer-based typesetting,Donald Knuth, who developed it over many yearsand made it freely available to the world. Knuthprovided for and invited

users to enhance T E X

, andit has in fact been extended to many types of doc-uments (letters, articles, books, slide shows, con-cert posters, etc.) and many domains (chemistry,chess, music, poetry, linguistics, critical editions,etc.). The most popular enhancement to TEX iscalled L

TEX, which supports most needs in a straight-forward manner.TEX is always used in conjunction with a texteditor that lets you move around in your documentadding new text, revising text, and adding instruc-tions for how you want the text formatted. UnlikeWord, TEX is available from a variety of commercial,shareware or free sources, configured in ways thatdifferent users find suitable (

www.tug.org/begin.html

). But, at their core, all of these have the sameTEX “typesetter” from Knuth, and most documentscan be moved from one TEX implementation to an-other without trouble.Another way that TEX is diﬀerent than Wordand many other word processors is that all typeset-ting instructions are explicitly typed into and shownin the document ﬁle. Here is a short, but perhapsinstructive, example L

TEX ﬁle:

\documentclass{article}\usepackage{a4}\usepackage{times}\begin{document}This is a small example of atwo paragraph document.This is the \emph{second} paragraph.\end{document}

And here is the formatted output (plus a page num-ber, not shown):

This is a small example of a two paragraph document.This is the

second

paragraph.

Some points to note: Where Word uses an extrastrike of the Enter key to indicate a new paragraphand this information is hidden after the last charac-ter of the paragraph (or with the

sign), L

TEX usesa visible blank line to indicate a paragraph break(see the example). In Word you can select the styleof document, paper size, and font with various menucommands; in L

TEX you type these instructions intoyour file as shown in the first lines of the example(A4 paper, Times fonts). In Word you might typecontrol-I to turn on italics, then type a word, andthen type control-I again to turn off italics; in L

TEXyou indicate

emphasis

explicitly (with

\emph

), asshown in the example’s second paragraph.Our purpose here is to explain what TEX is—not to compare the power of TEX with the power of other types of word processors. Suﬃce it to say thatmany people ﬁnd TEX and its companions useful ina wide variety of applications.Because TEX from any source has the same ex-tendable basic capability and because the capabil-ity for enhancement is very explicit, users are mo-tivated to enhance TEX and there is tremendoussharing of enhancements among TEX users. TheComprehensive TEX Archive Network (

CTAN

) is amassive collection of TEX enhancements for vari-ous application domains, document types, and type-setting ﬂourishes. Discussion groups, for example,

comp.text.tex

and

texhax@tug.org

, provide fo-rums where users can seek help from other (somevery expert) users. The TEX Users Group (

TUG

)and other national user groups provide resourcessuch as user conventions and journals (like this one).If you aren’t already using TEX, you might tryproTEXt for Windows (

www.tug.org/protext

), TEXLive for Unix (

www.tug.org/tex-live

), or gwTEXfor Mac

OSX

(

www.rna.nl/tex.html

). When askedhow much to install, it’s simplest to select

all

pack-ages.After getting a system installed, a ﬁrst test isto run

pdflatex sample2e

and view the resulting