LaTeX is a software system for document preparation. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in "What You See Is What You Get" word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document, and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file suitable for printing or digital distribution.
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing business. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984.
TeX, stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system which was designed and written by Donald Knuth and first released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
Vector graphics are computer graphics images that are defined in terms of points on a Cartesian plane, which are connected by lines and curves to form polygons and other shapes. Vector graphics have the unique advantage over raster graphics in that the points, lines, and curves may be scaled up or down to any resolution with no aliasing. The points determine the direction of the vector path; each path may have various properties including values for stroke color, shape, curve, thickness, and fill.
Metafont is a description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into e.g. PostScript. Metafont was devised by Donald Knuth as a companion to his TeX typesetting system.
The device independent file format (DVI) is the output file format of the TeX typesetting program, designed by David R. Fuchs and implemented by Donald E. Knuth in 1982. Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not intended to be human-readable; they consist of binary data describing the visual layout of a document in a manner not reliant on any specific image format, display hardware or printer. DVI files are typically used as input to a second program which translates DVI files to graphical data. For example, most TeX software packages include a program for previewing DVI files on a user's computer display; this program is a driver. Drivers are also used to convert from DVI to popular page description languages and for printing.
MetaPost refers to both a programming language and the interpreter of the MetaPost programming language. Both are derived from Donald Knuth's Metafont language and interpreter. MetaPost produces vector graphic diagrams from a geometric/algebraic description. The language shares Metafont's declarative syntax for manipulating lines, curves, points and geometric transformations. However,
Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form with a single source file. It is implemented by a computer program released as free software of the same name, created and made available by the GNU Project from the Free Software Foundation.
CUPS is a modular printing system for Unix-like computer operating systems which allows a computer to act as a print server. A computer running CUPS is a host that can accept print jobs from client computers, process them, and send them to the appropriate printer.
In computers, a printer driver or a print processor is a piece of software on a computer that converts the data to be printed to a format that a printer can understand. The purpose of printer drivers is to allow applications to do printing without being aware of the technical details of each printer model.
Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely used in scientific publishing, especially in disciplines that make frequent use of mathematical notation.
A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for printing, is a screen font.
TeX font metric (TFM) is a font file format used by the TeX typesetting system. It is a font metric format, not an outline font format like TrueType, because it provides only the information necessary to typeset the font such as each character's width, height and depth. The actual glyphs are stored elsewhere. This is not unique to TeX; Adobe's AFM files and Windows' PFM files use the same technique.
In printing, Preflight is the process of confirming that the digital files required for the printing process are all present, valid, correctly formatted, and of the desired type. The basic idea is to prepare the files to make them feasible for the correct process such as offset printing and eliminate costly errors and facilitate a smooth production. It is a standard prepress procedure in the printing industry. The term originates from the preflight checklists used by pilots. The term was first used in a presentation at the Color Connections conference in 1990 by consultant Chuck Weger, and Professor Ron Bertolina was a pioneer for solutions to preflighting in the 1990s.
Foomatic is a configurable printing filter. It uses PPD files as configuration to generate appropriate output for a given printer. It is spooler independent which means it can be used with Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), LPRng and others. It uses Ghostscript in the background, using options according to the PPD file of the printer. Currently it is developed by the OpenPrinting workgroup of the Linux Foundation.
dvipng is a cross-platform program for converting the DVI output of the TeX typesetting system into PNG image format. Dvipng was written by Jan-Åke Larsson.
The text-producing systems LaTeX and TeX produce DVI files from files written by the user. Those files used to be post-processed by a tool called dvips, which converted those DVI files into PostScript files, which are understood by many printers.
The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, when Jiří Zlatuška and Phil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas with Donald Knuth at Stanford University. Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
PGF/TikZ is a pair of languages for producing vector graphics from a geometric/algebraic description, with standard features including the drawing of points, lines, arrows, paths, circles, ellipses and polygons. PGF is a lower-level language, while TikZ is a set of higher-level macros that use PGF. The top-level PGF and TikZ commands are invoked as TeX macros, but in contrast with PSTricks, the PGF/TikZ graphics themselves are described in a language that resembles MetaPost. Till Tantau is the designer of the PGF and TikZ languages. He is also the main developer of the only known interpreter for PGF and TikZ, which is written in TeX. PGF is an acronym for "Portable Graphics Format". TikZ was introduced in version 0.95 of PGF, and it is a recursive acronym for "TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm".
The Harlequin RIP is a raster image processor first released in 1990 under the name "ScriptWorks" running as a command-line application to render PostScript language files under Unix. It was developed by Harlequin, a software company based in Cambridge, England.
