RE: Tex
David Webster wrote:
Hate to sound stupid but just what is TeTex? What is it used for?
You don't sound stupid! It a package for word processing. The only thing stupid you can do is NOT to use TeX for your word processing. It is realy great! At school I had a teacher in computer science, who could talk for hours about the benefits of TeX. He showed us documents he wrote using TeX on a unix machine 20 years ago, which he had printed just days before he showed the document to us. It looked just perfect, and he didn't have to change one bit of text. You should try printing a document written in WP51 on a machine running WP61. You will have to reconfigure your lay-out first. This problem doesn't exist in TeX because in TeX you don't have to worry about the lay-out of your document. TeX does this for you. LaTeX makes sure your text is easy to read by taking an easy to read font and fontsize, by making sure that there are not to many characters on a line, and by lots of other things.
There is a lot of knowledge about how the lay-out of a document should be in LaTeX, so the writer doesn't have to worry about it. For example: I don't know what the best way is of emphasizing a part of a text. I boldface the best way or should I use italic or slanted? Using LaTeX I don't have to worry about that. I just put the emphasize command in the text an LaTeX will emphasize it the right way. Look at the following example:
TeX was created by \emph{Donald E. Knuth} and is a bit like a programming language.
In this example Donald E. Knuth will be emphasized.
Another big advantage of using TeX is that you can exchange documents between different machines without any problems. For example, I ones had to edit a text, written in m$-word 7 on Win95 machine A, on Win95 machine B, also using m$-Word 7 (I know that you should not us micro$oft products, but I had no choice. Sorry). Every é (e apostrophe) written on machine A was converted to J on machine B. It took me about a hour to correct this. If you want an é in LaTeX, you just give the command \'{e}. That's portable!
I could probably write a book about all benefits of TeX, but there already is a lot of good documentation on TeX available.
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