TeX is a free typesetting system for which many extensions have been developed. [1]
LaTeX is a software system for document preparation. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG 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.
TeX, stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system which was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor 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.
Blackboard bold is a typeface style that is often used for certain symbols in mathematical texts, in which certain lines of the symbol are doubled. The symbols usually denote number sets. One way of producing blackboard bold is to double-strike a character with a small offset on a typewriter. Thus, they are also referred to as double struck.
LyX is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, which follow the WYSIWYG paradigm, LyX has a WYSIWYM approach, where what shows up on the screen roughly depicts the semantic structure of the page and is only an approximation of the document produced by TeX.
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The name is a portmanteau of the word bibliography and the name of the TeX typesetting software.
Omega is an extension of the TeX typesetting system that uses the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. It was authored by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous after TeX development was frozen in 1991, primarily to enhance TeX's multilingual typesetting abilities. It includes a new 16-bit font encoding for TeX, as well as fonts covering a wide range of alphabets.
ConTeXt is a general-purpose document processor. Like LaTeX, it is derived from TeX. It is especially suited for structured documents, automated document production, very fine typography, and multi-lingual typesetting. It is based in part on the TeX typesetting system, and uses a document markup language for manuscript preparation. The typographical and automated capabilities of ConTeXt are extensive, including interfaces for handling microtypography, multiple footnotes and footnote classes, and manipulating OpenType fonts and features. Moreover, it offers extensive support for colors, backgrounds, hyperlinks, presentations, figure-text integration, and conditional compilation. It gives the user extensive control over formatting while making it easy to create new layouts and styles without learning the low-level TeX macro language.
In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space, , also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space, is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position. In some formats, including HTML, it also prevents consecutive whitespace characters from collapsing into a single space.
XeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license.
ArabTeX is a free software package providing support for the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets to TeX and LaTeX. Written by Klaus Lagally, it can take romanized ASCII or native script input to produce quality ligatures for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Western Punjabi (Lahnda), Maghribi, Uyghur, Kashmiri, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino and Yiddish. ArabTeX characters are placed within a TeX/LaTeX document using the command \RL{ ... }
or the environment \begin{RLtext} ... \end{RLtext}
. ArabTeX is released under the LaTeX Project Public License v1+.
TIPA is a free software package providing International Phonetic Alphabet and other phonetic character capabilities for TeX and LaTeX. Written by Rei Fukui, TIPA is based upon the author's previous work in TSIPA. In 2018, the TeX TIPA Roman font was selected as best representing the IPA symbol set by the International Phonetic Association's Alphabet, Charts and Fonts committee.
FontForge is a FOSS font editor which supports many common font formats. Developed primarily by George Williams until 2012, FontForge is free software and is distributed under a mix of the GNU General Public License Version 3 and the 3-clause BSD license. It is available for operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and is localized into 12 languages.
Cambria is a transitional serif typeface commissioned by Microsoft and distributed with Windows and Office. It was designed by Dutch typeface designer Jelle Bosma in 2004, with input from Steve Matteson and Robin Nicholas. It is intended as a serif font that is suitable for body text, that is very readable printed small or displayed on a low-resolution screen and has even spacing and proportions.
WinEdt is a shareware Unicode (UTF-8) editor and shell for Microsoft Windows. It is primarily used for the creation of TeX documents, but can also be used to edit HTML or any other type of text file. It can be configured to run as a front-end for a variety of TeX systems, including MiKTeX, fpTeX and TeX Live. WinEdt's highlighting schemes can be customized for different modes and its spell checking functionality supports multi-lingual setups, with dictionaries (word-lists) for many languages available for downloading from WinEdt's Community Site. It supports DVI and PDF workflow.
Beamer is a LaTeX document class for creating presentation slides, with a wide range of templates and a set of features for making slideshow effects.
FarsiTeX is a free Persian/English bidirectional typesetting system based on the TeX system. The FarsiTeX project was initiated by Mohammad Ghodsi at Sharif University of Technology in 1993.
LuaTeX is a TeX-based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the TeX Live distribution as a successor to pdfTeX. Later in the project some functionality of Aleph was included. The project was originally sponsored by the Oriental TeX project, founded by Idris Samawi Hamid, Hans Hagen, and Taco Hoekwater.
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".