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, written as LaTeX in plain text, is a document preparation system for the (TeX) typesetting program. It is used mainly by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers in academia. It is also widely used by people outside of these fields as a primary or intermediate format (e.g. translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF) due to the quality of typesetting achieved by TeX. It offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies, and much more. LaTeX was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport at SRI International and has become the dominant method for using TeX—few people write in plain TeX anymore. The current version is (LaTeX2e). Both LaTeX and TeX are free software. LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level language to access the power of TeX. LaTeX is essentially comprised of a collection of TeX macros, and a program to process LaTeX documents. TeX's formatting commands are very low-level, and thus it is much simpler for end-users to use LaTeX. The typesetting system LaTeX is based on the idea that authors should be able to focus on the meaning of what they are writing, without being distracted by the visual presentation of the information. In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using familiar concepts such as chapter, section, table, figure, etc., and lets the LaTeX system worry about the presentation of these structures. It therefore encourages the separation of layout from content, while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments where needed. This is similar to the mechanism by which many word processors allow styles to be defined globally for an entire document, or the CSS mechanism used by HTML. LaTeX can be arbitrarily extended by using the underlying macro language to develop custom formats. Such macros are often collected into packages which are available to address special formatting issues such as complicated mathematical content or graphics. In addition, there are numerous commercial implementations of the entire TeX system, including LaTeX, to which vendors may add extra features like additional typefaces and telephone support. LyX is a free visual document processor that uses LaTeX for a back-end. TeXmacs is a free, WYSIWYG editor with similar functionalities as LaTeX, but a different typesetting engine. A number of popular commercial DTP systems use modified versions of the original TeX typesetting engine. The recent rise in popularity of XML systems and the demand for large-scale batch production of publication-quality typesetting from such sources has seen a steady increase in the use of LaTeX. The example below shows the LaTeX input:
This input would produce the following LaTeX output: Example from Online LaTeX. Pronunciation LaTeX is usually pronounced or (that is, not with the pronunciation English speakers normally associate with X). The last character in the name comes from a capital χ (chi), as the name of TeX derives from the Greek τέχνη (skill, art, technique). While TeX's creator Donald Knuth promoted the pronunciation, Lamport has said he does not favor or deprecate any pronunciation for LaTeX. It is traditionally printed with the special typographical logo shown on this page. In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced in running text, the word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX to avoid confusion with the word “latex”. Implementations, distributions, and licensing LaTeX is typically distributed along with plain TeX, and same considerations apply to its implementations: LaTeX is available on operating systems including Linux, Unix, Windows, and MacOS X, and in fact, two different implementations are typically available on each system: one that outputs a DVI file, and another based on pdftex, which outputs an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. The default font is Knuth's Computer Modern, which gives most documents created with LaTeX the same distinctive look and feel as those created with plain TeX. A number of TeX/LaTeX distributions are available, including TexLive (multiplatform), teTeX (unix), fpTeX and MiKTeX (Windows), CMacTeX and OzTex (Macintosh). LaTeX is distributed under a free software license, the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). The LPPL is not compatible with the GNU General Public License, as it requires that modified files also modify the actual physical file names; this was done to ensure that files that depend on other files will produce the expected behavior and avoid dependency hell. A new version of the LPPL that will be compatible with the GPL is in the works. The LPPL is DFSG compliant since its version 1.3. Editors and IDEs There are many editors and IDEs available. Tools and packages Tutorials Books Platform-specific topics Online reference materials Community resources Periodicals | |||||||
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