What is Plain TEX?
TEX is a computer program for typesetting documents. It takes a computer file, prepared according to the rules of TEX, and converts it to a form that may be printed on a high-quality printer, such as a laser writer, to produce a printed document of a quality comparable with good quality books and journals. Simple documents, which do not contain mathematical formulae or tables may be produced very easily: e ectively all one has to do is to type the text straight in (though observing certain rules relating to quotation marks and punctuation dashes). Typesetting mathematics is somewhat more complicated, but even here TEX is comparatively straightforward to use when one considers the complexity of some of the formulae that it has to produce and the large number of mathematical symbols which it has to produce.
There are various `dialects' of TEX, including LaTEX. Plain TEX (created by D. E. Knuth) is the basic version of TEX on which these other `dialects' are based. The reference manual for Plain TEX is "The TEXbook", by D. E. Knuth.
In order to produce a document using TEX, we must rst create a suitable input file on the computer. We apply the TEX program to the input file and then use the printer to print out the so-called `DVI' file produced by the TEX program (after first using another program to translate the `DVI' file into a form that the printer can understand).
There are various `dialects' of TEX, including LaTEX. Plain TEX (created by D. E. Knuth) is the basic version of TEX on which these other `dialects' are based. The reference manual for Plain TEX is "The TEXbook", by D. E. Knuth.
In order to produce a document using TEX, we must rst create a suitable input file on the computer. We apply the TEX program to the input file and then use the printer to print out the so-called `DVI' file produced by the TEX program (after first using another program to translate the `DVI' file into a form that the printer can understand).
