This document is intended to provide a direct start with TEX programming (not necessarily TEX typesetting). The addressed audience consists of people interested in package or library writing. At the time of this writing, this document is far from complete. Nevertheless, it might be a good starting point for interested readers. Consult the literature given below for more details.<\/p>\n
TeX, stylized within the system as\u00a0TEX<\/span>, is a\u00a0typesetting system<\/a> that was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor\u00a0Donald Knuth<\/a> and first released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex\u00a0mathematical formulae<\/a>; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.<\/p>\n TeX is widely used in\u00a0academia<\/a>, especially in\u00a0mathematics<\/a>,\u00a0computer science<\/a>,\u00a0economics<\/a>,\u00a0political science<\/a>,\u00a0engineering<\/a>,\u00a0linguistics<\/a>,\u00a0physics<\/a>,\u00a0statistics<\/a>, and\u00a0quantitative psychology<\/a>. It has long since displaced\u00a0Unix troff,\u00a0the previously favored formatting system, in most\u00a0Unix<\/a>\u00a0installations. It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of\u00a0LaTeX<\/a>,\u00a0ConTeXt<\/a>, and other macro packages.<\/p>\n TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books with minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time (together with the\u00a0Metafont\u00a0language for\u00a0font\u00a0description and the\u00a0Computer Modern\u00a0family of\u00a0typefaces). TeX is\u00a0free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"