The last two decades have witnessed a revolution in the realm of typography, with the virtual disappearance of hot-lead typesetting in favor of the so-called digital typesetting. The principle behind the new technology is simple: imagine a very fine mesh superimposed on a sheet of paper. Digital typesetting consists in darkening the appropriate pixels (tiny squares) of this mesh, in patterns corresponding to each character and symbol of the text being set. The actual darkening is done by some printing device, say a laser printer or phototypesetter, which must be told exactly where the ink should go. Since the mesh is very fine-the dashes surrounding this sentence are some six pixels thick, and more than 200 pixels long-the printer can only be controlled by a computer program, which takes a "high-level" description of the page in terms of text, fonts, and formatting commands, and digests all of that into "low-level" commands for the printer. TEX is such a program, created by Donald E. Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University.

This book is a friendly introduction to TEX, the powerful typesetting system designed by Donald Knuth. It is addressed primarily to beginners, but it contains much information that will be useful to aspiring TEX "wizards". Moreover, the authors kept firmly in mind the diversity of backgrounds that characterizes TEX users: authors in the sciences and in the humanities, secretaries, technical typists ... The book contains a careful explanation of all fundamental concepts and commands, but also a wealth of commented examples and "tricks" based on the authors' long experience with TEX. The attentive reader will quickly be able to create a table, or customize the appearance of the page, or code even the most complicated formula. The last third of the book is devoted to a Dictionary/Index, summarizing all the material in the text and going into greater depth in many areas.

Create high-quality and professional-looking texts, articles, and books for Business and Science using LaTeX.

TEX is now widely used for computer typesetting in mathematics, science, and engineering. This book is a carefully paced, tutorial introduction for people first learning the system. Special emphasis is given to what can go wrong, and how to fix things. LATEX notes are provided for use with a set of macros. Features First book about TEX that is really for beginners. Shows the reader not only what TEX is, but how to use it. Teaches the reader how to write simple macros for all major formatting tasks. Covers typesetting of mathematics, includes conditionals, and auxiliary files, and describes TEX's boxes and rules. Contains tips on diagnosing bugs, and fixing line and page breaks, along with useful reference material. 0201547996B04062001

Computing Methodologies -- Text Processing.

This book is a friendly introduction to TEX, the powerful typesetting system designed by Donald Knuth. It is addressed primarily to beginners, but it contains much information that will be useful to aspiring TEX "wizards". Moreover, the authors kept firmly in mind the diversity of backgrounds that characterizes TEX users: authors in the sciences and in the humanities, secretaries, technical typists ... The book contains a careful explanation of all fundamental concepts and commands, but also a wealth of commented examples and "tricks" based on the authors' long experience with TEX. The attentive reader will quickly be able to create a table, or customize the appearance of the page, or code even the most complicated formula. The last third of the book is devoted to a Dictionary/Index, summarizing all the material in the text and going into greater depth in many areas.