First the bad news: TEX is a large and complicated program that goes to extraordinary lengths to produce attractive typeset material. This very complication can cause unexpected things to happen at times. Now the good news: straightforward text is very easy to typeset using TEX. So it’s possible to start with easier text and work up to more complicated situations.
The purpose of this manual is to start from the very beginning and to move towards these more complicated situations. No previous knowledge of TEX is assumed. By proceeding a section at a time, greater varieties of text can be produced.
Here are a few suggestions: there are some exercises in each section. Be sure and do them! The only way to learn TEX is by using it. Better yet, experiment on your own; try to make some variations on the exercises. There is no way that you can damage the TEX program with your experiments. You can find a complete answer to most exercises by looking at the TEX source file that was used to produce this document. You’ll notice that there are references in the right margin to The TEXbook1. When you feel that you want more information on a topic, that’s where to look.
Incidentally, there are a few fibs that appear in this manual; they are used to hide complications (I look at this as something like poetic license). As you become more experienced at using TEX, you’ll be able to find them.
TEX is a public domain program that is available for no license fee. It was developed by Donald Knuth at Stanford University as a major project. In the profit-oriented market place, the program would certainly cost many thousands of dollars. The TEX Users Group (TUG) is a nonprofit organization which distributes copies of TEX, this manual, updates software, and gives information about new developments in both hardware and software in its publications TUGboat and TEXniques.
