by Patrick Julius

Created on: July 26, 2007

TeX is actually a whole class of programs in various distributions, designed for quite literally any operating system on the market (including obscure Linux distributions!); its primary purpose is in typesetting words and equations, and it is in wide use among scientists and mathematicians.

The basic idea of TeX is that a keyboard can be used to enter commands representing the purpose of the formatting, and then the computer can figure out from that what formatting to use in the typesetting.

For instance: On Microsoft Word, you might create a section heading by typing "Section 8: Schrodinger's Equation" and then making it size-18 and bold. If you're a power user, you might even set this as a style, called "Section." Still, Word doesn't know that's what this is; as far as it's concerned, it's just some text with a particular formatting.

In TeX, however, you'd type: \section{Schr\"odinger's Equation}. [that \" is just to create the accent mark over the "o" in "Schrodinger."] TeX then knows that this is a section, will number it based on the number of sections in the document, and will then format it as is appropriate for the type of document being created. If you insert a new section or change the document type from "paper" to "book", TeX will make all the appropriate adjustments automatically.

The biggest differences between TeX and other types of word processing (usually called WYSIWIG, for "what you see is what you get") lies in the appearance: in other word processors, what you type is what appears in the final document, and things in general look good, but not great; they often seem slightly wrong to the eye. In TeX, everything reads like a simple form of computer code at first, but then, once the file is compiled into PDF, the result is a professional-looking document with perfect typesetting, even of complex mathematical equations.

If you are involved in math or science on a regular basis, or the look of your writing is just very important to you, I strongly suggest giving TeX a try; thanks to programs like WinEdt and TeXnicCenter, it's quite easy to do, and the results are very impressive.

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