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MacTeX Technical Working Group:
What is TeX?
What is TeX ?
TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books---and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics.
-- Donald E. Knuth,
[The TeXBook, Preface]
David Salomon provides and excellent TeXplanation in "The Advanced TeXbook". An excerpt of this is provided by Blue Sky Systems on its
What the heck is TeX?
page. More information is also available in the TeX FAQ originated by UK TeX Users' Group (UK TUG).
Where is TeX Used?
TeX is used in many academic areas for publishing papers in journals
and books in such fields as
Astronomy, Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering,
Geography, GeoPhysics,
Humanities, Linguistics, Mathematics, Philosophy,
Physics, etc.
It is used not only to prepare documents in English, but also in
almost every language around the world. For example in countries such as:
Asia |
China, India, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam
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Europe |
Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy,
Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden
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Middle East |
Egypt, Iran, Israel
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It is also used as part of systems for preparing complex documents
containing Bibliographies, Cross Referencing, Dictionairies,
and Indexing. Some lesser-known areas where it is used (secretly) are:
DataBase Publishing,
BackEnd Post Processing.
There are 27 TeX
Local User Groups (LUGs) around the world with approximately 7700 members (as of 2004). The user groups provide technical support and funds for development
of projects such as TeX Live
and TeX fonts,
among others.
The TeX Merchandising Project,
helps to raise the public awareness of TeX as well as raising funds for the user groups.
TeX Typesetting
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The TeX showcase
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contains examples of what you can do with TeX, the typesetting engine from
Donald E Knuth, the creator and Grand Wizard of TeX. Professor Knuth, a world famous mathematician and computer scientist, is the author of the series of books on The Art of Computer Programming for which TeX was written.
The examples include material prepared not only with plain TeX, but
also with macro packages and related programs such as
LaTeX,
ConTeXt,
pdf(La)TeX, and
MetaPost.
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The ConTeXt showcase
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This link brings you to the ConTeXt showcase, a suite of pdf documents
that contains manuals and examples made by
ConTeXt and
Metafun. There
are documents for print and screen, and many of them are interactive.
© Copyright 2003 TeX Users Group
All rights reserved.
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