What You Should Know About TEX and LATEX - Covington ...

What You Should Know About 

TEX and L A TEX 

Melody Covington 

Covington Innovations 

706 549-4633 

TEX and L A TEX are the most advanced technology available for 

typesetting scholarly books. Many of the books published by 

Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall, and Cambridge University Press are 

typeset with TEX andL A TEX. Mathematics books are rarely typeset any 

other way. 

TEX, the automated typesetter, is the result of a twenty-year 

project by Donald Knuth of Stanford University, the inventor of computer 

typesetting as we know it. Knuth collaborated with Hermann Zapf to 

become an expert typographer, and his knowledge of typesetting is built 

into the program. 

Instead of relying on the user to move things around on the screen, TEX 

automatically tries thousands of combinations of line breaks and page 

breaks on every job, picking the one that gives the best results. Detailed 

knowledge of kerning, hyphenation, and mathematical notation is built 

into TEX. 

The name TEX consists of the Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi 

and is pronounced “tekh.” 

L A TEX, the automated layout artist, is the creation of Leslie 

Lamport, also of Stanford, and has been in wide use for more than ten 

years, undergoing continuous refinement. L A TEX isasoftwarepackagethat 

tells TEX how to lay out books in several standard formats. This includes 

automated figure placement, cross-referencing, and indexing. L A TEX 

enforces a perfectly consistent layout and style. 

L A TEX is radically different from office-type word processors or 

page layout programs such as PageMaker. The difference is 

this: Other programs give you a blank page on which you 

place type and other objects, but L A TEX actually lays out the 

pages for you in accordance with your specifications. It’s like 

the difference between buying a typewriter and hiring a typist. 

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TEX and L A TEX are at their best when typesetting a book or series 

of books with a standard design. Many publishers have just two or three 

L A TEX book designs, which they use for all their books. Others make minor 

or major customizations for each book typeset. 

Implementing a new book design in L A TEX is a sizable amount of work 

because it involves modifying software. For this reason, I cannot supply 

sample pages of a book design “on spec.” Once the design is 

implemented, the computer does the rest, and relatively little human 

intervention is needed to typeset the entire book. 

You can save money by using a book design you have used before, 

or a minor modification of a standard one. Since L A TEX has considerable 

typographic expertise built in, you need not specify everything. Whenever 

you leave something unspecified, L A TEX knows how to conform to 

standard practice. You do not need to specify the exact appearance of 

indented and enumerated lists, footnotes, and the like; L A TEX has 

reasonable defaults built in. 

Indeed, it can be a mistake to specify too much. If you don’t specify the 

size of a table, L A TEX will automatically size it to fit its contents. If you start 

specifying all the column widths, you’re doing unnecessary work, and 

you’ll prevent L A TEX from coming up with what might well have been a 

more pleasing layout. 

Authors often like to use L A TEX for books that contain mathematical 

formulas. If an author is preparing a manuscript with L A TEX please ask for 

my brochure of instructions to authors. They will save work for the 

author, editor, and typesetter. 

In the absence of the brochure, instruct authors to use L A TEX2.09or 

L A TEX2ε and use high-level commands such as chapter and section 

rather than working out layouts for themselves. 

Fonts available include all Adobe Type 1 fonts as well as TEX’s own 

built-in fonts. Particularly noteworthy is Computer Modern Roman, a 

favorite for computer program listings because it is narrower and more 

legible than Courier. It is available only with TEX. 

Accents for foreign languages and phonetic symbols are available. 

L A TEX files are of two kinds. The text of the book is a plain ASCII file 

with markup codes inserted, for example: 

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\chapter{First Steps in Calculus} 

\section{Derivatives} 

The derivative of a function is its rate of change. 

For example, given the function $y = f(x)$, the 

derivative $dy/dx$ is the rate of change of $y$ 

relative to $x$, or $\lim_{\Delta x \rightarrow 0} 

\Delta y$. 

Note that instead of typing a chapter or section heading, the author or 

typist uses the commands \chapter and \section. Likewise, instead of 

trying to reproduce mathematical formulas on the screen, the author types 

them in L A TEX’s special language, using commands such as \Delta. 

This method of typing has three advantages: 

• L A TEX files can be typed, viewed, and edited with any file editor or 

word processor. 

• You don’t have to worry about whether subtle details of typography 

are visible on the screen. Instead, you type L A TEX commands and 

L A TEX will set exactly what you tell it to. 

• A completely separate file called a style sheet (actually a computer 

program) defines what the \chapter and \section commands, and 

their kin, actually do. The typist does not have to worry about the 

physical layout or consistency of chapter or section headings on the 

screen. 

The third of these is the most important. The typist doesn’t have to worry 

about keeping style, margins, and layout consistent from one page or 

chapter to the next. In fact, the typist can’t set margins – that is left entirely 

to the style sheet! If you typeset ten books with the same style sheet, they 

are guaranteed to look the same. 

Figures are placed automatically. It is possible to tie figures to 

specific places in the text, but L A TEX also knows how to handle “floats” — 

floating figures and tables that are placed where convenient, separated 

from text by a line or some blank space, as is standard practice in scholarly 

books. 

Figure numbering is done automatically, and in order to refer to them in 

the text, figures can be given names that will automatically be replaced by 

the correct numbers. 

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L A TEX is portable. L A TEX input files and style sheets are identical, and 

produce identical results, whether L A TEX is running on a PC, Macintosh, 

UNIX system, VAX, IBM mainframe, or something else. 

Usual practice is to deliver the results of the typesetting in the form of 

PostScript files. These files are also completely portable; they contain all 

needed fonts within them and will produce identical printouts on any 

PostScript printer or phototypesetter, regardless of the type of computer to 

which it is attached. 

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What You Should Know About TEX and LATEX - Covington ...

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