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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label whatTeX</title>
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<h3>What is TeX?</h3>
<p/>TeX is a typesetting system written by
<a href="http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/">Donald E. Knuth</a>, who
says in the Preface to his book on TeX
(see <a href="FAQ-books.html">books about TeX</a>) that it is
“<em>intended for the creation of beautiful books — and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics</em>”.
<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
“the Art of Computer Programming”. 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
‘<a href="FAQ-lit.html">literate programming</a>’ 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’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
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’re “programming in TeX”, they usually mean
they’re programming in Plain TeX.
<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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