The PracTeX Journal - TeX Users Group

Many people discover LaTeX after years of struggling with wordprocessors and desktop publishing systems, and are amazed to find that TeX has been around for nearly 25 years and they hadn't heard of it. It's not a conspiracy, just ‘a well-kept secret known only to a few million people’, as one anonymous user put it.

Donald Knuth originally wrote TeX to typeset mathematics for the second edition of his master-work The Art of Computer Programming¹, and it remains pretty much the only typesetting program to include fully-automated mathematical formatting done the way mathematicians want it. But TeX is much more than math: it's a programmable typesetting system which can be used for almost any formatting task, and LaTeX has made it usable by almost anyone. Knuth generously placed the entire system in the public domain, so for many years there was no publicity of the commercial kind which would have got TeX noticed outside the technical field. Nowadays, however, there are many companies selling TeX software or services, dozens of publishers accepting LaTeX documents for publication, and hundreds of thousands of users using LaTeX for millions of documents.²

There is occasionally some confusion among newcomers between the two main products, TeX and LaTeX:

TeX is a typesetting program, originally written by Knuth at Stanford around 1978. It implements a macro-driven typesetters' programming language of some 300 basic operations and it has formed the core of many other desktop publishing systems. Although it is still possible to write in the raw TeX language, you need to study it in depth, and you need to be able to write macros (subprograms) to perform even the simplest of repetitive tasks.
LaTeX is a user interface for TeX, designed by Leslie Lamport in 1985 to automate all the common tasks of document preparation. It provides a simple way for authors and typesetters to use the power of TeX without having to learn the entire language. LaTeX is the recommended system for all users except professional typographic programmers and computer scientists who want to study the internals of TeX.

Debunking the mythology

Naturally, over all the years, a few myths have grown up around LaTeX, often propagated by people who should know better. So, just to clear up any potential misunderstandings...

MYTH: ‘LaTeX has only got one font’

Most LaTeX systems can use any OpenType, TrueType, Adobe (PostScript) Type1 or Type3, or METAFONT font, among others. This is more than most other known typesetting systems. LaTeX's default font is Computer Modern, not Times Roman, and some people get upset because it ‘looks different’. Typefaces differ: that's what they're for.

MYTH: ‘LaTeX is a Unix system’

People are also heard saying: ‘LaTeX is a Windows system’, ‘LaTeX is a Mac system’, etc., etc. ad nauseam. TeX systems run on almost every computer in use, from some of the biggest supercomputers down to handhelds (Personal Digital Assistants like the Sharp Zaurus). That includes Windows and Linux PCs, Macs, and all Unix systems. If you're using something TeX doesn't run on, it must be either incredibly new, incredibly old, or unbelievably obscure.

MYTH: ‘LaTeX is obsolete’

Quite the opposite: it's under constant development, with new features being added almost weekly to the CTAN archive. It's arguably more up-to-date than most other systems: LaTeX had the Euro (€) before anyone else, it had Inuktitut typesetting before the Inuit got their own province in Canada, and it still produces better mathematics than anything else.

MYTH: ‘LaTeX isn't WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)’

Simply not true. The typeset preview from TeX systems is better WYSIWYG than any wordprocessor and most desktop publishing systems.

What critics mean is that LaTeX's typographic display is asynchronous with the edit window. While this is true of many TeX implementations, there are several synchronous versions (see details of synchronous versions).

MYTH: ‘LaTeX is ‘too difficult’’

This has been heard from physicists who can split atoms; from mathematicians who can explain why π exists; from business people who can read a balance sheet; from historians who can grasp Byzantine politics; from librarians who can understand LoC and MARC; and from linguists who can decode Linear ‘B’. Most people grasp LaTeX in 20 minutes or so. It's not rocket science (or if it is, I know any number of unemployed rocket scientists who will teach it to you).

MYTH: ‘LaTeX is ‘only for scientists and mathematicians’’

Not at all. Although it grew up in the mathematical and computer science fields, two of its biggest growth areas are in the humanities and business, especially since the rise of XML brought new demands for automated typesetting.

Glossary:

CTAN. The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is a repository or collection of Web and FTP servers worldwide which contain copies of almost every free piece of software related to TeX and LaTeX. CTAN is rooted at http://www.ctan.org/ (See Jim Hefferon's article on CTAN in this issue. -Ed.)

XML. Extensible Markup Language. A simple yet powerful system for defining document structure. XML is now becoming the principal system of markup, replacing older systems such as SGML.

Knuth, Donald Ervin: The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, second edition, 0-201-89685-0, 1980.
A guesstimate. With free software it's impossible to tell how many people are using it, but it's a lot.

[Editor's note: This was adapted from the Preface of Peter Flynn's Formatting Information, November 2003. See Peter's site for the original html and pdf versions of this guide.]

Peter Flynn is manager of the electronic publishing unit at University College Cork and also runs a small consultancy handling industrial, research, and legal documentation. He found TeX in 1979 and has used it for everything from business cards to posters. Peter can be reached at

In my opinion

Debunking the mythology