Many people discover LATEX after years of struggling with
wordprocessors and desktop publishing systems, and are amazed to
find that TEX has been around for over 40 years and they
hadn’t heard of it. It’s not a conspiracy, just ‘a
well-kept secret known only to a few million people’,
as one user has put it.
Perhaps a key to why it has remained so popular is that it
removes the need to fiddle with the formatting while you write.
Playing around with fonts and formatting is highly attractive,
not just to new computer users, and it’s great fun, but it is
completely counter-productive for the serious author or editor
who needs to concentrate on actual
writing—ask any journalist or
professional writer. ‘Best-guess’ estimates by
experts in the field of usability engineering are that average
computer users may spend up to 50% of their time fiddling
with the formatting rather than thinking or writing—and
this is with the so-called ‘office productivity
software’ that the major manufacturers foist on their
clients!
A few years ago a new LATEX user expressed concern on the
comp.text.tex newsgroup
about ‘learning to write in LATEX’. Some
excellent advice was posted in response to this query,
which I reproduce with permission below (the bold text is my own
emphasis; full link in Heller (2003) below):
No, the harder part might be writing,
period. TeX/LaTeX is actually easy, once you relax and stop
worrying about appearance as a be-all-and-end-all. Many people
have become ‘Word Processing Junkies’ and
no longer ‘write’ documents,
they ‘draw’ them, almost at the same level as a pre-literate
3-year-old child might pretend to
‘write’ a story, but is just creating a
sequence of pictures with a pad of paper and box of
Crayolas—this is perfectly
normal and healthy in a 3-year old child who is being
creative, but is of questionable usefulness for, say, a grad
student writing a Master's or PhD thesis or a business person
writing a white paper, etc. For this reason,
I strongly recommend
not using any sort of fancy
GUI ‘crutch’. Use a plain vanilla
text editor and treat it like an old-fashioned typewriter.
Don't waste time playing with your mouse.
Note: I am not saying that you should
have no concerns about the appearance of your document, just
that you should write the document
(completely) first and tweak the appearance
later...not [spend time on] lots of
random editing in the bulk of the document itself.
(Heller, 2003)
More recently, an article reporting on a study of writing
patterns between Microsoft Word users and LATEX users reported
that it was faster to use Word
(Knauff & Nejasmic, 2014). As a reviewer of that article, I
asked the authors to make it clearer that the use of the proper
templates (classes and packages) removed the need for LATEX
users to spend the time formatting that Word users do. The
publication of the article upset a number of people in the TEX
field, but I hope that it will spur the critical examination of
how we write, and why it’s better to do it in LATEX than in
other systems.
Learning to write well can be hard, but authors shouldn’t
have to make things even harder for themselves by using
manually-driven systems which break their concentration every
few seconds for some footling adjustment to the appearance,
simply because the software is incapable of doing it right by
itself.
Donald Knuth originally wrote
TEX to typeset mathematics for the second edition of his
master-work The Art of Computer Programming (Knuth, 1980), and it
remains pretty much the only typesetting program to include
fully-automated mathematical formatting by default, done the way
mathematicians do it. But he also brought out a booklet called
Mathematical Writing (Knuth, Larrabee & Roberts, 1989) which
shows how important it is to think about what you write, and how
the computer should be able to help, not hinder, the author
while writing.
But TEX is much more than math: it’s a programmable
typesetting system which can be used for almost any formatting
task, and the LATEX document preparation system which is built
on TEX has made it usable by almost anyone. Professor Knuth
generously placed the entire TEX system in the public domain,
which meant it is free for anyone to use, but for many years
this also meant that there was little commercial publicity which
would have got TEX noticed outside the technical field,
because there was no great corporate marketing department to
advertise its existence. Even now, some people who used it in
college believe that it no longer exists!
Nowadays, however, there are several companies selling TEX
software or services, dozens of publishers accepting LATEX documents for
publication, and hundreds of thousands of users using LATEX
for millions of documents.
There is occasionally some confusion among newcomers between
the two programs, TEX and LATEX, and the other versions
available, so the differences are explained in the list in the Preface below.
- TEX
The underlying typesetting program, originally written
by Donald Knuth at Stanford
in 1978–79. It implements a macro-driven typesetters’
programming language of some 300 basic operations, and it
has formed the core of many other desktop publishing (DTP) systems.
Although it is still possible to write in the raw TEX
language, you need to study it in depth, and you need to
be able to write macros (subprograms) to perform even the
simplest of repetitive tasks.
- LATEX
A user interface for TEX, designed by Leslie Lamport while at
Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) in 1985 to automate the common
tasks of document preparation. It provides a simple way
for authors and typesetters to use the power of TEX
without having to learn the underlying language. LATEX
is the recommended system for all users except
professional typographic programmers and computer
scientists who want to study the internals of
TEX.
- ConTEXt
(not ‘Contest’) A system
similar to LATEX, but with its own set of commands, and
a much greater emphasis on producing high-function
PDF output. The documentation is less
accessible than for LATEX, but the author, Hans Hagen, provides
excellent support at Pragma/ADE.
- pdfTEX and pdfLATEX
Extended versions of the
tex and
latex programs that create
PDF instead of DVI
files, written by Hàn
Thế Thành. There are also
enhancements for microtypographic extensions, native font
embedding, and PDF support for
hyperlinking. It is currently (2022) still the default
TEX engine in most distributions.
- XƎTEX and XƎLATEX
A recent reimplementation of the
tex and
latex programs by Jonathan Kew which
merges Unicode and modern font technologies. It is already
in common use in editing environments such as TEXshop (Apple Macintosh
OS X), Kile (Unix &
GNU/Linux), and
WinEdt (Windows). Details are
at the
Sourceforge web site.
XƎLATEX is used to produce the
PDF edition of this book, and is the
recommended system for new users as its Unicode features
make the use of mnemonics for non-Latin characters largely
unnecessary, and it works with any of the user’s installed
system fonts. Newcomers are unlikely to need the
scripting facilities of LuaLATEX but they are of course
welcome to use it instead.
- LuaTEX and LuaLATEX
LuaLATEX is a development of XƎLATEX which has a
copy of the Lua scripting
language built into it. This means you can write actual
programs inside LATEX, for example to calculate results
and prepare statistics, avoiding the need for a separate
set of external programs. The output is recalculated
afresh each time, so if the data is rapidly changing, it
can always represent the most recent values. It also
implements a slightly different way of accessing
TT and OT
fonts.
- TeXinfo
TeXinfo is the official documentation format of the
GNU project. It was invented by Richard Stallman and
Bob Chassell. It uses a
single source file to produce output in a number of
formats, both online and printed (DVI,
HTML, [GNU]
INFOrmation (INFO), PDF,
XML,
DocBook, EPUB v3, etc). TeXinfo documents can be
processed with any TEX engine.
Both TEX and LATEX have been constantly updated since
their inception. Knuth has now frozen changes to the underlying
TEX engine so that users and developers now have a bug-free,
rock-stable platform to work with. Typographic programming development continues with
the New Typesetting System (NTS),
planned as a successor to TEX, and LATEX3 as a long-term
successor to current LATEX. The LATEX Project manages the
ongoing development of LATEX (see https://www.latex-project.org), and the current
version is LATEX2ε, which is what we are concentrating on
here. Details of all developments can be had from the
TUG web site at http://www.tug.org
