Here is a Web page that promotes tex-the world's most beautiful, most interesting, and most reliable typesetting program. Hopefully through my presentation, you'll be able to experience the happy feeling of using Tex and become a user and supporter of Tex. Because the penetration rate of TeX in China is still very low, we must publicize it properly. If you can't help falling in love with Tex and you want more people to benefit from it, then introduce Tex to your friends.
No matter how you get here, or when you're writing a paper, you get dizzy with the tedious function of Word, and you want to see if this new thing can eliminate your troubles? Or you're heard TeX, but you don't know what the hell is going on here? Or do you not know what LaTeX and TeX, MikTeX, teTeX have to do with it? Or you are being pulled over by my "public service advertisement" ... This is a very interesting page:)
This page is divided into a number of small topics, which can be called a non-technical FAQ. There's a lot of interesting talk about TeX that I've collected, and you can choose what you like to see.
TeX is a typesetting system. With TeX, you can write your article into a book that effect. You can print it out, or send it to a publisher. TeX is perfect for writing various academic papers, books, slideshows. "TeX is not a program for making more beautiful books, but for making the most beautiful books." ”
TeX is not produced by a company, it is mainly designed and implemented by computer scientist D.e.knuth. In the process of the birth of Tex, it also contains the advice and requirements of thousands of users of Tex. TeX used the font contains a lot of calligrapher, font designer credit, including the famous Hermann Zapf, in fact Knuth himself is also a font design artist. TeX's macro package, font, ... Tens of thousands of experts from various fields are designed according to their own professional needs. So TeX is the crystallization of the collective wisdom of scientists and artists all over the world.
Look at the top right, it's TeX. TeX's name is made up of uppercase Greek letters. In Greek the word means "technology" and "art", which also explains its pronunciation. "T" and "E" are like the sounds in "technology", while "X" sounds similar to "ch" in the Scottish word "Loch" or the German word "Ach", also similar to "J" in Spanish or "KH" in Russian. When you read the word on the computer screen, your screen will fog.
The beautiful lady on the left is Metafont. She specializes in making good-looking fonts for TeX.
LaTeX read: "Thunder Tex". Hey.
Word and WordPerfect are "word Processor" (word processor), they are WYSIWYG (WYSIWYG), you directly modify the font, color, with the mouse to draw the table ... You'll see the effect right away. What effect is displayed on the screen, printed out ... That's basically the effect. And Tex is not, you enter a text file, you need a program (of course, TeX) processing to get a post-typesetting results.
Do you think the WYSIWYG is good? In fact, there is better, TeX is "WYTIWYG (what you want to get)". When you write your paper in TeX, you don't have to think "what font does this word use?" "How much should this line be indented?" ”，...... This kind of problem. You can focus on your ideas, the logic of your work, so that you can better think for your readers and write better than WYSIWYG. Write the article in Tex, you think, "should this paragraph belong to the previous section?" "," is this sentence consistent with the subject of my chapter? "," Should we start a new chapter? "...
What you tell TeX is: "This is the beginning of a chapter", "This word should be emphasized", "here is a poem" ... Instead of telling it: "This is the 3rd chapter, should use the bold third word, the beginning has a ' double s ', ...", "this word with italic italics small four", "indent each inch around, right do not align, change with small one number flower body" ...
In Tex, Tex is your typesetting worker, you are a poet, a writer ... When using word processing program, you both as the author and as a typesetting worker, tired not tired?
In fact, you also know that the Good word processing program printed out the effect is very different from what is seen on the screen, and TeX generated by the DVI file on the screen to see what is, print out absolutely that look, every character each stroke, ... are identical. In a way, TeX is the "WYSIWYG".
TeX is really old, and it hasn't changed much since 1982. But do you believe there is such a perfect program in the world? It has almost no bugs, and you can use it on almost any computer, from PC to Cray Jumbo. After decades of wind and frost, it is still the document typesetting industry "the most", "State-of-the-art". Its trump status will remain clear in 21st century! The version of
TeX has remained unchanged since March 1995, and has only recently become 3.141592 in 3.14159. What does that mean? This shows that it has become perfect. You should change all software required from 0.1, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, ..., 3.0, 3.1, up, 98, +, XP, ... Constantly upgraded ideas.
Tex is so stable that documents from decades ago will not change at this time, and the Tex syntax you learn is guaranteed to never go out of date.
Although the Tex program and the language itself do not change, Tex can be extended without modifying the subject. The extensibility of Tex makes it one of the first systems to support PDFs, and you can refer to the context column. Based on various formats of Tex, the application is surging and flourishing. TeX is now still SGML, the backend backbone of XML.
Although the documentation you have made decades ago does not change, you can choose to use a modern approach to your documents. When the new macro package is produced, you can make your "ancient books" have the most popular effect today, just by changing a few words. Like a PDF file with hyperlinks and a bookmark!
Usually we shouldn't mess with the superlative, but in this case, I can use the "most beautiful", "most beautiful", even "perfect" to describe TeX, because there is no other program to deal with such complex content, the results can be compared with TeX! These problems are so complicated that microsoft,quark and even Adobe are not interested. Tex is so mighty that Tex often becomes the cause of the "religious war".
Superseding, there will definitely be more than TeX in the future. They should be able to learn a lot from TeX. Even if one day, TeX is no longer the best, but its shadow will still appear in other programs.
That's right. What's important is the content. But if you edit your masterpiece and think about what the font should be, how big the line spacing is, ... Will the quality of your content be affected? TeX makes you focus on the content, which is in line with your consistent thinking Ah! And by the way you get a world-class aesthetic effect, why not?
Those who know are inferior to those who are good, and those who are better than those who are happy.
Beautiful presentations can greatly deepen our perception of difficult concepts.
See beautiful formulas, all called typography, elegant fonts, you feel the melody of beauty, flowing, one go ... Even the most difficult concepts will be easily printed into your brain, lasting the same!
cannot say that there are no bugs at all. Knuth with his own design of the "Literary programming language" Web wrote all the Tex code, to the official release, he was very confident to reward $1.28 to the first to find a bug, every time a bug found, the bonus will double, up to $327.68. Later, due to the addition of support for 8-byte characters, some minor bugs were generated. From 1995 to now, a total of only one bug was found. Bugs are found to be more and more long, and later bugs are not general program problems such as memory Ah, file Ah, but some in the typesetting industry very picky people picked out some of the "typography" on the problem. But the rigorous Knuth still treat them as bugs. However, the last bug has been discovered in advance by Knuth (see below):)
Knuth also rewarded $2.56 for every person who found his book wrong. But Knuth's signature is so valuable that the person who puts the check in the box is more than the person who cashed the check, even the largest amount of:P
This is definitely not the case! Knuth not only made all the code public, but also welcomed the use of TeX to make it a better typesetting program. However, in order to ensure that the previous document will not lose support, to ensure a stable language, Knuth requires the modified program name can not use "TeX" the three words. We should be satisfied with this little request.
There are really a lot of improved TeX, such as Omega, NTS, ... Their ideas are similar to Tex, and it's easy for people who have used Tex to use those programs.
TeX is constantly approaching the perfect $\pi$. The last bug in TeX has been discovered by Knuth, and the following is the "will" written by Knuth in advance:
the absolutely final change (to being made after my death) @x mo Dule 2@d banner== ' This was Tex, version 3.14159 ' {printed when \tex\ starts}@y@d banner== ' This is Tex, version $\pi$ ' {Prin Ted when \tex\ starts} @zWhen the "is made", the corresponding line should being changed Involume B, and also on page 23 Of the texbook.my last'll and testament for TeX are that's no further changes be madeunder any circumstances. Improved systems should not being called simply ' TeX '; That's name, unqualified, should refer only to the program Forwhich I had taken personal responsibility. --Don Knuth Oh, you have a concept not to understand. The two are actually the same program, but at a different level, TeX is the cornerstone of latex and latex is built on top of Tex. If you want to figure out exactly what their relationship is, you can see how LATEX+CJK works.
In fact, there is only one Tex program in the world, it is called "Tex", it is designed and implemented by computer scientist D. E. Knuth. TeX is not only a typesetting program, but also a programming language. LaTeX is a "Tex macro package" written in this language, which expands the functionality of Tex, making it easy for us to create logical creations instead of concentrating on fonts and indenting these annoying things. TeX also has other large macro package, they are called "format" together with LaTeX, and now there is a commonly used format called ConTeXt, it can easily make extremely beautiful slide, dynamic screen document ... We usually use Tex with the LaTeX, ConTeXt, because the bottom of Tex needs more knowledge to understand, the average person does not need to design their own format.
So the answer is LaTeX is as good as TeX.
LATEX2E is the current version of LaTeX. Previous latex was called latex 2.09. This is history:) You are now free to download a TeX system with LaTeX all latex2e.
No. Many people think of plain TeX as the bottom of the story, not really. Plain and LaTeX are all TeX's macro packages, also known as format, which are equal relationships. Just this plain format is too simple, you need to define a lot of macros to work well, so called "plain". Underneath them is Tex, or a clear point called "Tex Primitive"-the most basic Tex language. You almost don't want to do anything with Tex primitive, because even if you play a very simple symbol, you'll need to spend a lot of primitive with Tex. Even the most stubborn "never use LaTeX," the bottom of the pie, they also dare not rely on plain TeX, because their own design of a format is not easy, you see, the simplest plain macro package has 1200 lines of bizarre TeX primitive!
After Knuth created Tex, the source code for the Tex program was released. So anyone can compile it into a program without having to modify that file, and then package the release with many other programs. So there are many distributions, such as Windows Miktex,fptex, ... There are tetex under Linux and UNIX. These abbreviations are "issued".
Do you know Linux? If you know I would like to make an analogy: TeX and MikTeX, teTeX ... Relationships, just like Linux and Debian Gnu/linux, Redhat Linux, ... The relationship. Each Tex release contains Tex, Metafont, LaTeX, Amstex, MetaPost, Dvips, pdfTeX, DVIPDFM ... Every Linux release contains Linux kernels, bash, gcc, tar, XFree86, ...
You can find out by comparing a very experienced Word user and a LaTeX beginner's document:
Word is the distance the user can see, and then use the mouse to adjust the left and right, but it is how to do not align. TeX distance is calculated, is based on the optimal algorithm, has the aesthetic sense of mathematics. TeX can achieve 63 accuracy in length! (1 Egyptian = 10-10 m)
Above this formula is a very familiar Word of the mathematics department of Friends to help me to use MS Equation 3.0 input, and then turned into a PDF after the effect, he said: "Fortunately, can recognize what is." "How do you feel when you look at other people's papers and see the formula?"
Look at the same formula for TeX input:
It's a huge difference. The mathematical formula for
TeX input is text. You can type directly with the keyboard. For example, this pretty formula is called:
$$\sum_{p\rm\;p rime}f (P) = \int_{t>1}f (t) d\pi (t). $$ \sum is the summation symbol, "_" The following is the subscript, \rm so that the back of the "prime" with traditional display, \; is a space. \int is the integral (integrate) symbol, and \pi is the pi symbol. Is it difficult? Are you in trouble? Well, try to experiment with Word's formula editor how to play this formula, and then compare the effect.
There are a lot of symbols that you can't easily find in Word. For example:
Input in TeX:
$$2\uparrow\uparrow k \mathrel{\mathop=^{\rm def}} 2^{2^{\cdot^{\cdot^{\cdot^2}} The \vbox{\hbox{$\big\}\scriptstyle k$}\kern0pt}.$$ is a little more complicated than the general formula, but do you find the simple correspondence in it? \uparrow is the upward arrow, \mathrel can construct that combination of the equal sign, \cdot is those points, we constantly improve superscript, the last curly braces slightly more complicated. The formula above
Defines a number that is scarier than "astronomical". This is almost a complex formula that many people will never meet in their lifetime, but you can learn more than that in one afternoon. Yes, one afternoon you can learn to enter the world's most complex formula. Like the following ... I don't know what it's like to go in there. Who knows what it is to tell me a sound.
Do you think Word's macros are powerful? In fact, TeX's macro is much stronger. Tex itself is a macro language, Tex macro is the real meaning of the macro, Tex's macro is one of the most powerful macros in the world. Macro This word means strong, with Tex macros you can define the structure with the change of parameters, Tex can use the macro to expand its own syntax, for example, Tex does not actually have a looping statement, but it can use a macro to implement a loop loop structure. The macros in
TeX can write powerful "macro packages". We often say that LaTeX is actually a macro package, this macro package is so big, we call it a "format", it almost completely changes and expands the ability of TeX.
So-called "format" is called using the document class in LaTeX. This is a way to separate styles and structures. LaTeX was one of the first systems to support this idea.
Now many university Harvard, UC, Oxford, UIUC ... All have their own LaTeX-defined graduation thesis format. Every worldwide academic organization SIAM, ACM, IEEE, AMS, ... have their own document format requirements of LaTeX-style files, including AMS (American Mathematics Association) also has a special Amstex, with special fonts. The authors have these style documents, which can be converted into the required format for an essay in a moment. Really for a moment, you try to change
\documentclass{article} to \documentclass[twocolomn]{ieeetran} at the beginning of your file run LaTeX, you immediately get an article that you can invest in IEEE transactions and meet all of their formatting requirements. The earliest word did not have this function at all, but a simple can change the font of the WYSIWYG, but later people found that once you write something in Word, and want to put all the bar headings in a font, you will need to change dozens of, hundreds of, thousands of places, so Word added " Format "to achieve a certain style and structure of the separation.
Later the user's request continued to improve, Word added "macro", VBScript, ... But in fact these features TeX has been there since the day of birth, and has a natural consistency. TeX influenced the subsequent various format systems, including HTML4/CSS, ... Word's stuff comes from LaTeX as well.
TeX in China is indeed very low. If people around you don't know Tex, you can tell them that Tex is the best typesetting system. Is there a lot of people around you that are using pirated Microsoft Word? No one denies that Microsoft's typesetting tools are clearly inferior to Quark's professional typesetting tools, but Quark's program encounters the kind of documentation that TeX handles, and is powerless.
This is a matter of purpose, not quality. Tex is for users who require a high degree of aesthetics, and Tex edits a logically structured document, which needs to be divided into chapters, illustrated numbers, ... So you won't see people using LaTeX in a toy company. TeX users are generally concentrated in schools and research institutions. For example, the European Atomic Energy Research Center (CERN) has hundreds of people, all of which are (La) TeX users, and someone who designs document styles as a hobby. The atmosphere is so good that you can easily get a uniform document. And many people write papers, books are very convenient.
I know that the supporters of TeX and Word supporters see the above comparisons as likely to scold me. TeX supporters will say: "There is no mistake!" You actually compare Tex to Word, which is simply demeaning to our Tex. "Word's supporters will of course be even angrier.
TeX has the best effect, which is not to be questioned. I use Word to make a comparison, just because most people around me with word, I can not find a better program to compare with TeX. I'm just using Word as an example of a word processor and a non-academic typesetting program.
In fact, I'm not belittling word, if you're a struggling MLM salesman, to print an annual report, I suggest you use Word.
You might like to write your paper in Word, but word and other word-processing programs and non-academic typesetting programs are obviously not suitable for writing a complex document such as a paper, which is especially inappropriate for writing mathematical papers, which is a lesson for countless people. Lotus WordPro, Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress are much better at typography than Word, but they are still very ugly when dealing with mathematical formulas.
Because a program such as Word is intended for a user who is not a science student, scientist, engineer. Its authors are not mathematicians themselves, so they have not been able to provide a good deal of mathematical formulas. If you use Word to edit a paper containing a large number of mathematical formulas, causing confusion in the reader's mind, is the author's fault, is the author of strong Word difficult. The effect is not the word's fault, Word does not promote "I edit the paper effect is good", Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress even did not consider you to edit the paper, because their designers know that their program can not have TeX features.
Of course not, otherwise where do they come in the market?
In theory, TeX's functionality includes all the functions of a word-processing program. But TeX exists to create the most complex documents. If your task is not very complex and you already have a word processor, it can do general tasks, such as printing a notice posted on the wall, making a non-mathematical slide, writing a novel, writing a business report, ...
TeX never wanted to kill all word handlers, which is obviously impossible. But people who have used Tex will love it so much that they can use Tex or even play it as a form of entertainment when they write to them later:)
You may often hear rumors of "LaTeX hard to learn". But pony, how can you listen to squirrels? You only know how deep the river is if you try it with your own feet! The first time you use Tex, you'll know how easy it is. Usually you use TeX called latex, and I can teach a person to write a decent document in latex in half an hour. Includes chapters, footnotes, catalogues, tables, illustrations, indexes, bibliography ... If you can see how easy it is, tell your friends: "LaTeX does not have to , as long as on the line. "
People generally think of Word as easy to use. Although Word seems to be very good to use, nothing to learn. But once your document needs to have chapters, catalogs, charts, indexes, mathematical formulas ... You'll need to start learning about its "advanced features". Of course, Word is able to make these things.
But later on, you find that it takes dozens of times times as much time to learn from Tex to use Word to achieve the same functionality. Word is constantly changing, constantly increasing the functionality that TeX has long had. There is no uniformity between the use of these features, and Word often requires several external programs to work together to accomplish something. Most scientists can't stand this kind of trouble, so few people write papers in Word.
Think about how long it took you to start using Word to figure out how to automatically generate a table of contents? You spend most of your time figuring out "how big is the size of this word to be as big as the second paragraph?" "How are these two lines always on the wrong line?"
In fact, with LaTeX, you can feel the perfect unity between those simple commands, which can be comprehend by analogy. You can write beautiful documents with little or no brain, of course, you can't use your brain to write. The rest of the brain is used to think about your content.
A friend of the Australian National University told me: "There are few people in our school who don't use LaTeX because it's so easy to use." But we just use it, and how it works we don't understand it at all. "And this friend is international trade professional, do not know how many computers, all the time to know skateboarding:)
Who said that? LaTeX illustrations are simple:
\begin{figure}\includegraphics{tex.eps}\caption{this is Me, \tex!} \label{tex}\end{figure} So after inserting the picture, the picture will be automatically placed in the appropriate beautiful place, automatically added number, you can use the
See figure \ref{tex} To refer to this picture. Then if the picture is numbered 1, then your sentence becomes "Please look at Figure 1". And you can use
\listoffigures
To get a list of all the pictures, including numbers, comments, page numbers, and plug them into your directory. If your document uses the HYPERREF macro package, you can also create a clickable directory in the PDF file. How convenient!
You just have to set up the listings macro package in a few words:
\usepackage{listings}\lstloadlanguages{c, CSH, make}\lstset{language=c,tabsize=4, keepspaces =true,breakindent=22pt, Numbers=left,stepnumber=1,numberstyle=\tiny,basicstyle=\footnotesize, Showspaces=false, Flexiblecolumns=true,breaklines=true, breakautoindent=true,breakindent=4em,escapeinside={/*@}{@*/}} You can line up thousands of lines of code into the following effect.
And you can insert tags in your code that you can reference in the article, such as you can insert a comment somewhere in the code.
/*@\label{code:restart}@*/int restart_card (...) {.....} Such comments are removed from the LaTeX when they are typeset. The notation is defined in \lstset , which is the " escapeinside={/*@}{@*/} " above.
You can say later: "In line \ref{code:restart }, we reboot." " \ref{code:restart} will be changed to the correct line number when typesetting." Even if the program changes later, the line number will be completely correct!
You have a very important question that is not clear. PDF and PS are the hardcopy format, a file Exchange format created by Adobe to try to "match paper", which is exactly the same as the paper effect. They are great inventions, but you can't edit beautiful PDFs and PS files directly, they are all generated by other programs.
Although in this age, Tex-written documents are mostly converted to PS, PDF, but the DVI files generated by Tex are not dependent on any hardcopy format. In the absence of PS, PDF, TeX still has high-quality output. PS and PDF make Tex more powerful, and Tex-generated PDFs are more beautiful than other programs generate. You see these examples are PS, PDF, even DJVU format. If you want to convert Word to PDF, you need Adobe Acrobat full version, the price is $249. Can you take it?
Publishers can basically accept any PDF, PS file. Even small publishers that can't handle latex can turn your files into PDFs, and you can even convert latex into HTML (latex2html), Word documents (Tex2doc), ... Publishers sometimes require that the source files of LaTeX be used in order to insert your article into the proceedings. So you can use LaTeX to write documents without any problems, but sometimes it is necessary.
Look at these big publishers, each of which puts the name of LaTeX first, and some even only (La) TeX.
XML, MathML, and even chemml, are essentially different things from TeX. TeX is a typesetting system, and XML is the way to express data.
These markup languages turn into beautiful documents that can be printed on paper, backed by back-end support such as TeX. So the relationship between XML and TeX is not antagonistic, but friendship.
Many people, such as pragma, are working on the combination of XML and Tex.
Of course I can. TeX is language-independent, which means that it can handle any human language. In TeX's eyes there is no language, only a different size of "box", these boxes can be filled with Chinese characters, can also be English, French, Arabic, Hebrew language ... Under LaTeX, you can use CJK Macro package to easily edit Chinese character documents, after CJK macro package, Chinese characters become the same thing as other languages-box.
LaTeX processing Chinese characters mainly rely on CJK Macro package, CJK Main task is to achieve Chinese character coding mapping, regardless of the Chinese format problem, it is by the German scholar Werner Lemberg design. There are many aspects of Chinese typography that are different from English, for example, many people complain about why the paragraph behind each section is not indented because the article format is written in English.
But you can modify all of this so that your document fits the same style you set yourself. It's pretty easy. You can also copy other people's style definitions, so you don't have to worry about the style yourself. Some publishers will also provide you with the format it requires in LaTeX format.
TeX is a very versatile program. It can not only edit papers, books, slides, academic magazines, but also can edit the score, chemical molecular map, circuit diagram, chess, Chinese chess, even go game, ... In fact, only a handful of documents are not suitable for TeX editing. You can take a look at the sample here.
TeX a macro package Musixtex can make the world's most beautiful sheet music. You can find a lot of music on Musixtex's Web page.
It is not usually appropriate to edit things without logical structure directly with TeX, such as newspapers, advertisements, etc... Those are always the macintosh,adobe and Quark of the world. Here the so-called "logical structure" is said to be divided into many chapters, illustrations, cross-references, reference numbers, ...
But you can design some Tex front-end procedures to deal with these things, in the beautiful newspaper, the magazine behind, perhaps still have the credit of Tex. Pragma company is committed to this kind of work, they use TeX as the back end, can even make books for children's teaching.
Unless you've used TeX in your paper and like it very much, you might not want to use it to edit a letter addressed to your mother.
In addition, novelists certainly do not need to use TeX, because the novel is all simple passages, up to several chapters, no cross-references, bibliography, and I guess the novelist when writing to see \begin{enumerate} ... \end{enumerate} must be a headache:)
I think the best release is Texlive CD, which not only contains all the programs required by the operating system, but also has a lot of macro packages, if you are not special users, with it you can complete any of your tasks. And it can be copied directly to the hard disk to use, even from the CD-ROM operation.
TeX's Chinese language support requires Chinese fonts. If you do not like to know too much details, you can go to http://www.ctex.org to download the Ctex set that they are ready to use in Chinese immediately.
If your hard drive is small, you can install the basic version of the Ctex suite. Please look here.
You should first learn to use the basic functions of LaTeX. Look lshort This book self-study, probably also is 90 minutes of time. Later, if you are interested, you can look at the Texbook, which has a lot of bottom-level details. Please refer to this information.
Article Source: http://www.ctex.org/documents/shredder/tex_frame.html
Tex-beauty and Fun
Start building with 50+ products and up to 12 months usage for Elastic Compute Service
1 on 1 presale consultation
24/7 Technical Support 6 Free Tickets per Quarter Faster Response
Alibaba Cloud offers highly flexible support services tailored to meet your exact needs.
A comprehensive suite of global cloud computing services to power your business
Payment Methods We Support
