TEX and LATEX Math mode

By Herbert Vob

It is often said that TEX was designed for mathematical or technical purposes. This may be true when we remember the reasons why Donald Knuth created TEX. But nowadays there are many examples in which TEX is used for publications with no mathematical or technical background content. However, writing publications with such material is one of the important advantages of TEX. Because it seems impossible to know all existing macros and options of (LA)TEX and the several additional packages, especially of AMSmath. This is the reason why I have attempted to gather all the relevant facts in this paper.

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A Gentle Introduction to TEX

By Michael Doob

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.

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Making TeX Work

By NormanWalsh

This book is for anyone who uses TeX. Novices will need at least one other reference, because this book does not describe the nuts and bolts of writing documents with TeX in any great detail.

If you are new to TeX, there is much to learn. There are many books that describe how to use TeX. However, the focus of this book is mostly at a higher level. After digesting Chapter 1, you should be able to proceed through the rest of the book without much difficulty even if you have never seen TeX before. So, if you are a system administrator interested in learning enough about these programs to install and test them for your users, you should be all set. If you are interested in learning how to write documents with TeX, this book will be helpful, but it will not be wholly sufficient.

Why do you need this book at all? Although many individual components of the TeX system are well documented, there has never before been a complete reference to the whole system. This book surveys the entire world of TeX software and helps you see how the various pieces are related.

A functioning TeX system is really a large collection of programs that interact in subtle ways to produce a document that, when formatted by TeX, prints the output you want. All the different interactions that take place ultimately result in less work for you, the writer, even though it may seem like more work at first. Heck, it may be more work at first, but in the long run, the savings are tremendous.

Many books about TeX refer the reader to a “local guide” for more information about previewing and printing documents and what facilities exist for incorporating special material into documents (like special fonts and pictures and figures). In reality, very few local guides exist.

The TeX environment is now mature and stable enough to support a more “global guide.” That is what this book attempts to be. It goes into detail about previewing and printing, about incorporating other fonts, about adding pictures and figures to your documents, and about many other things overlooked by other books.

Because fonts play a ubiquitous role in typesetting, this book is also about MetaFont, the tool that Donald Knuth designed for creating fonts.

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TEX for the Impatient

By paul W. Abrahams, Kathryn A Hargeaves, and Karl Berry

Donald Knuth’s TEX, a computerized typesetting system, provides nearly everything needed for high-quality typesetting of mathematical notations as well as of ordinary text. It is particularly notable for its flexibility, its superb hyphenation, and its ability to choose aesthetically satisfying line breaks. Because of its extraordinary capabilities, TEX has become the leading typesetting system for mathematics, science, and engineering and has been adopted as a standard by the American Mathematical Society. A companion program, METAFONT, can construct arbitrary letterforms including, in particular, any symbols that might be needed in mathematics. Both TEX and METAFONT are widely available within the scientific
and engineering community and have been implemented on a variety of computers. TEX isn’t perfect—it lacks integrated support for graphics, and some effects such as revision bars are very difficult to produce—but these drawbacks are far outweighed by its advantages.

TEX for the Impatient is intended to serve scientists, mathematicians, and technical typists for whom TEX is a useful tool rather than a primary interest, as well as computer people who have a strong interest in TEX for its own sake. We also intend it to serve both newcomers to TEX and those who are already familiar with TEX. We assume that our readers are comfortable working with computers and that they want to get the information they need as quickly as possible. Our aim is to provide that information clearly, concisely, and accessibly.

This book therefore provides a bright searchlight, a stout walking-stick, and detailed maps for exploring and using TEX. It will enable you to master TEX at a rapid pace through inquiry and experiment, but it will not lead you by the hand through the entire TEX system. Our approach is to provide you with a handbook for TEX that makes it easy for you to retrieve whatever information you need. We explain both the full repertoire of TEX commands and the concepts that underlie them. You won’t have to waste your time plowing through material that you neither need nor want.

In the early sections we also provide you with enough orientation so that you can get started if you haven’t used TEX before. We assume that you have access to a TEX implementation and that you know how to use a text editor, but we don’t assume much else about your background. Because this book is organized for ready reference, you’ll continue to find it useful as you become more familiar with TEX. If you prefer to start with a carefully guided tour, we recommend that you first read Knuth’s The TEXbook (see page 18 for a citation), passing over the “dangerous bend” sections, and then return to this book for additional information and for reference as you start to use TEX. (The dangerous bend sections of The TEXbook cover advanced topics.) The structure of TEX is really quite simple: a TEX input document consists of ordinary text interspersed with commands that give TEX further instructions on how to typeset your document. Things like math formulas contain many such commands, while expository text contains relatively few of them.

The time-consuming part of learning TEX is learning the commands and the concepts underlying their descriptions. Thus we’ve devoted most of the book to defining and explaining the commands and the concepts. We’ve also provided examples showing TEX typeset output and the corresponding input, hints on solving common problems, information about error messages, and so forth. We’ve supplied extensive cross-references by page number and a complete index. We’ve arranged the descriptions of the commands so that you can look them up either by function or alphabetically. The functional arrangement is what you need when you know what you want to do but you don’t know what command might do it for you. The alphabetical arrangement is what you need when you know the name of a command but you don’t
know exactly what it does.

We must caution you that we haven’t tried to provide a complete definition of TEX. For that you’ll need The TEXbook, which is the original source of information on TEX. The TEXbook also contains a lot of information about the fine points of using TEX, particularly on the subject of composing math formulas. We recommend it highly.

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