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TeX is a document typesetting program which allows people to include
mathematical notation into a paper. It consists of commands which
are embedded into the text of a document. These commands describe
commonly used mathematical notation which is not easily generated
from a normal keyboard. Some examples of these include the integral
symbol, the limit symbol and fractions which are placed one on top
of the other. Before learning TeX, you should be familiar with Emacs,
the text editor, with which you form the files that TeX will process.
Emacs is discussed in a previous chapter of this document.
There are many different flavors of TeX available on the Math
Department machines. TeX, LaTeX, AMSTeX, and AMSLaTeX are the four
most commonly used. TeX is the original text formatting language.
LaTeX is a package of macros that makes things like Table of Contents
pages and basic report styles much easier to generate. AMSTeX and
AMSLaTeX have extensions to TeX and LaTeX which are provided by
the American Mathematical Society. In the rest of this document,
when TeX\ is mentioned, all of the above versions of TeX are implied.
An introduction to LaTeX entitled "Essential LaTeX"
is available from the Departmental Consultant. A bibliography of
TeX and LaTeX\ reference books is included in the bibliography section
of this document. If you have never used a text formatting language
before, we highly recommend that you learn LaTeX first because it
simplifies many of the complex processes involved in document preparation.
Tim Kohl
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