TEX
From RationalWiki
TEX (or the more .txt-friendly TeX; the X is pronounced as a guttural like the Greek letter χι) is the favored document processing system of all the cool kids[1]. It was invented by legendary computer science professor Donald Knuth of Stanford University and is widely used to publish papers in technical fields, often to the exclusion of more modern graphical page layout software. It is particularly good at formatting mathematical equations. (Most users, however, do not use raw TeX codes, preferring to use a widely-distributed macro package known as LATEX.) [2]
It is also more or less open source -- TeX was one of the first truly high-quality open source software projects, with the source code being in the public domain, and it is written in WEB, a Pascal derivative that can also be used to generate program documentation from the same source file as the program code. It is believed to be very nearly or completely bug-free; Knuth has a reward system for people who find bugs, but has not paid out a check in a long, long time. Incidentally, while the source code is public domain, Knuth keeps a tight leash on the TeX trademark, allowing only packages that pass a rigorous software acid test to bear the name.
While it is theoretically capable of supporting almost any font with its METAFONT language, TeX documents are generally characterized by Computer Modern, a modernist font with a distinct resemblance to the Bodoni font family.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ For values of "cool kids" equal to "college math, science, and engineering professors and their students".
- ↑ I have no idea what if anything this has to do with rationalism, but there was a place for the article. Maybe something about software holy wars?
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