Unix Programming - The Zoo of Unix Documentation Formats

On-line Guides

Eclipse Documentation

How To Guides

The Art of Unix Programming
Prev	Home	Next

Unix Programming - The Zoo of Unix Documentation Formats - TeX

TeX

TeX (pronounced /teH/ with a rough h as though you are gargling) is a very capable typesetting program that, like the Emacs editor, originated outside the Unix culture but is now naturalized in it. It was created by noted computer scientist Donald Knuth when he became impatient with the quality of typography, and especially mathematical typesetting, that was available to him in the late 1970s.

TeX, like troff(1), is a markup-centered system. TeX's request language is rather more powerful than troff's; among other things, it is better at handling images, page-positioning content precisely, and internationalization. TeX is particularly good at mathematical typesetting, and unsurpassed at basic typesetting tasks like kerning, line filling, and hyphenating. TeX has become the standard submission format for most mathematical journals. It is actually now maintained as open source by a working group of the the American Mathematical Society. It is also commonly used for scientific papers.

As with troff(1), human beings usually do not write large volumes of raw TeX macros by hand; they use macro packages and various auxiliary programs instead. One particular macro package, LaTeX, is almost universal, and most people who say they're composing in TeX almost always actually mean they're writing LaTeX. Like troff's macro packages, a lot of its requests are semi-structural.

One important use of TeX that is normally hidden from the user is that other document-processing tools often generate LaTeX to be turned into PostScript, rather than attempting the much more difficult job of generating PostScript themselves. The xmlto(1) front end that we discussed as a shell-programming case study in Chapter14 uses this tactic; so does the XML-DocBook toolchain we'll examine later in this chapter.

TeX has a wider application range than troff(1) and is in most ways a better design. It has the same fundamental problems as troff in an increasingly Web-centric world; its markup has strong ties to the presentation level, and automatically generating good Web pages from TeX sources is difficult and fault-prone.

TeX is never used for Unix system documentation and only rarely used for application documentation; for those purposes, troff is sufficient. But some software packages that originated in academia outside the Unix community have imported the use of TeX as a documentation master format; the Python language is one example. As we noted above, it is also heavily used for mathematical and scientific papers, and will probably dominate that niche for some years yet.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

The Art of Unix Programming
Prev	Home	Next

Published under free license.

Design by Interspire