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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label readtex</title>
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<h3>Reading (La)TeX files</h3>
<p>So you’ve been sent a TeX file: what are you going to do with it?
<p>You can, of course, “just read it”, since it’s a plain text file,
but the markup tags in the document may prove distracting. Most of
the time, even TeX experts will typeset a TeX file before
attempting to read it.
<p>So, you need to typeset the document. The good news is that TeX
systems are available, free, for most sorts of computer; the bad news
is that you need a pretty complete TeX system even to read a single
file, and complete TeX systems are pretty large.
<p>TeX is a typesetting system that arose from a publishing project (see
<a href="FAQ-whatTeX.html">what is TeX</a>),
and its basic source is available free from its author. However, at
its root, it is <em>just</em> a typesetting engine: even to view or to
print the typeset output, you will need anciliary programs. In short,
you need a TeX <em>distribution</em> — a collection of
TeX-related programs tailored to your operating system: for details
of the sorts of things that are available, see
“<a href="FAQ-TeXsystems.html">TeX distributions</a>”
or
“<a href="FAQ-commercial.html">commercial TeX distributions</a>”.
<p>But beware — TeX makes no attempt to look like the sort of
WYSIWYG system you’re probably used to (see
<a href="FAQ-notWYSIWYG.html">why is TeX not WYSIWYG</a>):
while many modern versions of TeX have a compile–view cycle that
rivals the best commercial word processors in its responsiveness, what
you type is usually <em>markup</em>, which typically defines a logical
(rather than a visual) view of what you want typeset.
<p>However, in this context markup proves to be a blessing in disguise: a
good proportion of most TeX documents is immediately readable in an
ordinary text editor. So, while you need to install a considerable
system to attain the full benefits of the TeX document that you
were sent, the chances are you can understand quite a bit of it with
nothing more than the ordinary tools you already have on your computer.
<p><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=readtex">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=readtex</a>
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