|
|
TeX (tai epsion chi) A typesetting language developed by Stanford professor Donald Knuth that is noted for its ability to describe elaborate scientific formulas. Pronounced "tek" or the guttural "tekhhh" (the X is the Greek chi, not the English X), TeX is widely used for mathematical book publishing throughout the world.
Knuth created the first prototype of TeX in 1978 to avoid having to continue using the Unix troff program to typeset his book series, "The Art of Computer Programming." It took eight years of writing and revising to complete the language. Available for DOS, Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux and other platforms, visit the TeX User Group at www.tug.org for more information. See LaTeX.
Tex [ teks] (textiles) A unit of fiber fineness assessed by the weight in grams of 1000 meters of yarn; the lower the number the finer the yarn.
TEX [ tek] (graphic arts) A text processing system available for many types of computers and used in particular for high-quality typesetting of documents with mathematical content.
| (publication) | TeX - /tekh/ An extremely powerful macro-based text
formatter written by Donald Knuth, very popular in academia,
especially in the computer-science community (it is good
enough to have displaced Unix troff, the other favoured
formatter, even at many Unix installations).
The first version of TeX was written in the programming
language SAIL, to run on a PDP-10 under Stanford's WAITS
operating system.
Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental
"Art of Computer Programming" (see Knuth, also bible). In
a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the
problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own
typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his
sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The
language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of "The
Art of Computer Programming" has yet to appear as of mid-1997.
(However, the third edition of volumes I and II have come
out). The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such
that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects
have started as a bit of toolsmithing on the way to
something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander
scale than most.
Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of
1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX.
When he returned to MIT that fall, he rewrote TeX's I/O to
run under ITS.
TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but
high-quality software. Knuth offers monetary awards to people
who find and report a bug in it: for each bug the award is
doubled. (This has not made Knuth poor, however, as there
have been very few bugs and in any case a cheque proving that
the owner found a bug in TeX is rarely cashed). Though
well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge
technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug
in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.
TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and
the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E
depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case "TeX" is
considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices).
Fans like to proliferate names from the word "TeX" - such as
TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster
(competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique.
Several document processing systems are based on TeX, notably
LaTeX Lamport TeX - incorporates document styles for books,
letters, slides, etc., jadeTeX uses TeX as a backend for
printing from James' DSSSL Engine, and Texinfo, the GNU
document processing system. Numerous extensions to TeX exist,
among them BibTeX for bibliographies (distributed with
LaTeX), PDFTeX modifies TeX to produce PDF and Omega
extends TeX to use the Unicode character set.
For some reason, TeX uses its own variant of the point, the
TeX point.
See also Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
ftp://labrea.stanford.edu/tex/.
E-mail: <tug@tug.org> (TeX User's group, Oregon, USA). | |
Tex a unit of linear density (g/km) used to describe the fineness of fibers and yarns. The Tex has been used in the USSR since 1956.
Want to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content. |
|
