Easy-to-use Chinese MTEX Suite
Hongbin Ma
Abstract: Although there are many free and commercial TeX collections and distributions, Chinese TeXers still have many difficulties in TeXing Chinese documents. Some of the problems Chinese TeX users confront with TeX distributions are: the huge size, complex structure, nontrivial installation and configuration, lack of a full-featured Chinese editor, and lack of other needed add-ons. These difficulties may prevent many people from becoming TeXers or TeX experts. Motivated by these issues and many other practical demands, the author and several friends developed an easy-to-use and easy-to-learn Chinese MTeX Suite, which is a green*, compact, free, convenient, pragmatic and powerful TeX distribution with many add-ons and unique features which are seldom available in other TeX distributions. The developers of MTeX have made continuous efforts to make this software more powerful and suitable for TeXers, programmers, teachers, and scientists. This article gives a brief introduction to the MTeX suite, including its motivation, main features, installation, usage instructions, kernel, default editor (Sc1IDE), and other add-ons.
Hongbin Ma is a professor at the School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology. He was born in Henan, China, in 1978. He received a B.Sc. from Zhengzhou University, China in 2001, and Ph.D from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. After three years service as a Research Scientist in Temasek Laboratories, National University of Singapore from August 2006 to July 2009, he joined School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology in September 2009, as a professor via the 100 Talents Scheme of BIT. He was recognized as one of New Century Excellent Talents in University in 2009, and was awarded the Huo Yingdong Young Teacher Prize in 2012. He is a fan of mathematics, programming and LaTeX, and hence he developed Chinese MTeX Suite to satisfy the needs of his research, work, and life. Currently MTeX is a small yet powerful TeX collection and software platform, which is green* and portable with many unique features, and has many Chinese users. You can reach Hongbin Ma at mathmhb at bit dot edu dot cn.
* Green software helps reduce the impact on the environment, usually indirectly by reducing the demand for new computing equipment. See http://wiki.cs.vu.nl/green_software/index.php/Green_software_%28definition%29
