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@@ -7,36 +7,40 @@
says in the Preface to his book on TeX
(see <a href="FAQ-books.html">books about TeX</a>) that it is
-&ldquo;<em>intended for the creation of beautiful books &mdash;</em>
-<em>and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics</em>&rdquo;.
+&#8220;<em>intended for the creation of beautiful books &#8212;</em>
+<em>and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics</em>&#8221;.
(If TeX were <em>only</em> good for mathematical books, much of its
-use nowadays would not happen: it&rsquo;s actually a pretty good general
+use nowadays would not happen: it&#8217;s actually a pretty good general
typesetting system.)
<p/>Knuth is Emeritus Professor of the Art of Computer Programming at
Stanford University in California, USA. Knuth developed the
first version of TeX in 1978 to deal with revisions to his series
-&ldquo;the Art of Computer Programming&rdquo;. The idea proved popular and
+&#8220;the Art of Computer Programming&#8221;. The idea proved popular and
Knuth produced a second version (in 1982) which is the basis of what
we use today.
<p/>Knuth developed a system of
-&lsquo;<a href="FAQ-lit.html">literate programming</a>&rsquo; to write TeX,
+&#8216;<a href="FAQ-lit.html">literate programming</a>&#8217; to write TeX,
and he provides the literate (WEB) source of TeX free of charge,
together with tools for processing the <code>web</code> source into something
-that can be compiled and something that can be printed; there&rsquo;s never
-any mystery about what TeX does. Furthermore, the WEB system
-provides mechanisms to port TeX to new operating systems and
-computers; and in order that one may have some confidence in the ports,
-Knuth supplied a <a href="FAQ-triptrap.html">test</a> by
+that can be compiled and something that can be printed; there is (in
+principle) never any mystery about what TeX does. Furthermore, the
+WEB system provides mechanisms to port TeX to new operating
+systems and computers; and in order that one may have some confidence
+in the ports, Knuth supplied a <a href="FAQ-triptrap.html">test</a> by
means of which one may judge the fidelity of a TeX system. TeX
and its documents are therefore highly portable.
-<p/>TeX is a macro processor, and offers its users a powerful
-programming capability. For this reason, TeX on its own is a
-pretty difficult beast to deal with, so Knuth provided a package of
-macros for use with TeX called Plain TeX; Plain TeX is
-effectively the minimum set of macros one can usefully employ with
-TeX, together with some demonstration versions of higher-level
-commands (the latter are better regarded as models than used as-is).
-When people say they&rsquo;re &ldquo;programming in TeX&rdquo;, they usually mean
-they&rsquo;re programming in Plain TeX.
+<p/>For the interested programmer, the distribution of TeX has some
+fascination: it&#8217;s nothing like the way one would construct such a
+program nowadays, yet it has lasted better than most, and has been
+ported to many different computer architectures and operating
+systems &#8212; the sorts of attributes that much modern programming
+practice aims for. The processed &#8216;readable&#8217; source of TeX the
+program may be found in the
+ <a href="FAQ-tds.html">TDS structured version</a> of the distribution.
+
+<dl>
+<dt><tt><i>Knuth&#8217;s source distribution</i></tt><dd><a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist.zip">systems/knuth/dist</a> (or <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/">browse the directory</a>)
+<dt><tt><i>Knuth&#8217;s sources in TDS layout</i></tt><dd><a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/latex-tds/knuth.tds.zip">macros/latex/contrib/latex-tds/knuth.tds.zip</a>
+</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatTeX">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatTeX</a>
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