[texhax] Plain Tex

[Axel E. Retif]

On  28 Sep, 2009, at 00:46, Joseph Wright wrote:

> Kelly wrote:
>> Dear Sir/Madam:
>> I have tried to learn TeX on my own through Knuth's book, and am  
>> writing stuff using a MikTex implementation on Windows Vista.
>> I would like to continue using plain TeX instead of LaTeX.
>> Is it possible to use color, include photos, and hyperlinks in my  
>> pdf files using plain TeX instead of LaTeX?
>> If so can you recommend a simple explanatory source to me, who  
>> knows little else than what is in the Knuth book.
>> Sincerely,
>>  Kelly McKennon
>
> Hello Kelly,
>
> As LaTeX is built by programming TeX, all of this is possible. The  
> issue is that all of these things are driver-dependent, and so are  
> done using \special's. This just puts the appropriate driver  
> instruction into the output, so you need to know what the driver  
> expects. You could consider the "minimal LaTeX" approach which some  
> plain users take, as this avoids needing to learn all of that type  
> of thing.

You can learn about this ``'minimal LaTeX' approach'' in the Eplain  
manual:

http://www.tug.org/eplain/doc/eplain.pdf

section 4.23, p. 33. If I were to use (not-so) plain TeX, I would use  
Eplain and said miniltx.tex (minimal LaTeX).

As I'm sure you have all these files in the proper place with your  
MiKTeX distribution, you can skip section 2 of the Eplain manual.


Best,

Axel