latex

1 a milky exudate from certain plants that coagulates on exposure to air

2 a water-base paint having a latex binder [syn: latex paint, rubber-base paint] [also: latices (pl)]

see latex

English

Alternative forms

• LaTeχ

Etymology

Blend of Leslie Lamport and TeX.

Pronunciation

• , /ˈleɪtɛx/, /"leItEx/ or , /ˈlatex/, /"latex/

Proper noun

1. A document-typesetting system derived from TeX and used mainly to create scientific and mathematical literature.

External links

LaTeX ( or /ˈleɪtɛk/) is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as 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.

The example below shows the LaTeX input:

\documentclass[12pt] \title \date \begin \maketitle \LaTeX is a document preparation system for the \TeX typesetting program. 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 and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few people write in plain \TeX anymore. The current version is \LaTeXe. \newline % This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output. % The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX \begin E &=& mc^2 \\ m &=& \frac \end \end

This input would produce the following LaTeX output:

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. Indeed, in the example above the eqnarray environment is deprecated by the amsmath package, which provides the typographically better align environment for the same purpose.

Pronouncing and writing "LaTeX"

LaTeX is usually or /ˈlɑːtɛk/ in English (that is, not with the /ks/ pronunciation English speakers normally associate with X, but with a /k/). 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); for this reason, TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a /tɛx/ pronunciation (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, or the last sound of the German word "Bach", similar to the Spanish "j" sound). Lamport, on the other hand, has said he does not favor or discourage any pronunciation for LaTeX.

The name 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". The TeX, LaTeX and XeTeX logos can be rendered via pure CSS and XHTML for use in graphical web browsers following the specifications of the internal \LaTeX macro.

Licensing

LaTeX is typically distributed along with plain TeX. It 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 must be clearly differentiable from their originals (usually by changing the filename); this was done to ensure that files that depend on other files will produce the expected behavior and avoid dependency hell. The LPPL is DFSG compliant as of version 1.3. As free/open source software, LaTeX is available on most operating systems including Linux, Unix (including the BSDs), Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS and AmigaOS. The first DVI previewers capable of on-screen previewing and modification of LaTeX documents were Amigas.

As a macro package, LaTeX provides a set of macros for TeX to interpret. There are many other macro packages for TeX, including Plain TeX, GNU Texinfo, AMSTeX, and ConTeXt.

When TeX "compiles" a document, the processing loop (from the user's point of view) goes like this: Macros > TeX > Driver > Output. Different implementations of each of these steps is typically available in TeX distributions. Traditional TeX will output a DVI file, which is usually converted to a PostScript file. More recently, Hàn Thế Thành and others have written a new implementation of TeX called pdfTeX, which also outputs to PDF and takes advantages of features available in that format. The XeTeX engine developed by Jonathan Kew merges modern font technologies with TeX.

The default font for LaTeX is Knuth's Computer Modern, which gives default documents created with LaTeX the same distinctive look as those created with plain TeX.

Versions

LaTeX2e is the current version of LaTeX. As of 2008, a future version called LaTeX3 is in development and it has been since the beginning of 1990s. Planned features include improved syntax, hyperlink support, a new user interface, access to arbitrary fonts, and new documentation.

There are numerous commercial implementations of the entire TeX system. System 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. Other WYSIWYG editors that produce LaTeX include Scientific Word on MS Windows.

A number of TeX distributions are available, including TeX Live (multiplatform), teTeX (deprecated in favour of TeXlive, Unix), fpTeX (deprecated), MiKTeX (Windows), MacTeX, gwTeX (Mac OS X), OzTeX (Mac OS Classic), AmigaTeX (no longer available) and PasTeX (AmigaOS) available on the Aminet repository.

See also

• Docbook
• ConTeXt

Notes

References

External links

• LaTeX home page
• CTAN – The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
• The UK TeX FAQ
• The TeX Users Group
• TeXnicCenter free open source LaTeX editor (Windows) http://www.texniccenter.org/
• LyX free open source GUI based editor that uses LaTeX for typesetting http://www.lyx.org/
• A very comprehensive wiki guide to LaTeX
• A Working Guide to Latex
• Getting Started with LaTeX (basic introduction to typesetting with TeX and LaTeX)