Modern TEX and Its Applications

Book excerpt: An essential new guide for TEX users TEX is a powerful typesetting language and processing environment developed by Professor Donald Knuth at Stanford University in the early 1980s. Its machine-independence has made it a defacto standard for text processing with microcomputers throughout the scientific and engineering communities. While there have been several TEX-based macro packages developed over the years, Modern TEX and its Applications focuses on the original macro package designed by Knuth upon which all other TEX programs are based-Plain TEX. All of the basic topics for understanding the TEX user environment are covered, including fonts and characters, formatting, math mode, macros, terminal and file operations, tables, and foreign language capabilities. A PC-compatible disk containing examples, extra typefaces and even a ready-to-run restricted version of TEX is included with the book. Modern TEX and its Applications is an essential guide for all scientists, engineers, technicians, and support staff who prepare technical text and documents using a version of TEX.