2.19 TeX

TeX[What is TeX?] is the typesetting language written by Donald Knuth. He wrote a format of TeX called Plain TeX, but many people find Plain TeX[Should I use Plain TeX or LaTeX?] complicated, so Leslie Lamport wrote a format of TeX called LaTeX to make it a bit easier to use[How does LaTeX relate to Plain TeX?]. You can think of LaTeX as a go-between converting your instructions into TeX. This document mostly uses the term LaTeX, even if the matter is more general to TeX, to avoid complicating matters. Some error messages you may see will be LaTeX messages, some will be TeX messages. LaTeX error messages tend to be a bit easier to understand than TeX messages. There are other formats of TeX, such as ConTeXt[What is ConTeXt?], but this book does not cover them.

This book is also available as A4 PDF or 12.8cm x 9.6cm PDF or paperback (ISBN 978-1-909440-00-5).