2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
|
|
|
TeX
|
|
|
|
|
|
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
|
|
|
/tekh/ , n. An extremely powerful macro -based text formatter written by
|
|
|
|
|
Donald E. Knuth , very popular in the computer-science community (it is good
|
|
|
|
|
enough to have displaced Unix troff , the other favored formatter, even at
|
|
|
|
|
many Unix installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural)
|
|
|
|
|
pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with
|
|
|
|
|
the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case TeX is considered an
|
|
|
|
|
acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate names from
|
|
|
|
|
the word TeX such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer),
|
|
|
|
|
TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. See also
|
|
|
|
|
CrApTeX. Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
|
|
|
|
|
quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental Art of
|
|
|
|
|
Computer Programming (see Knuth , also bible ). In a manifestation of the
|
|
|
|
|
typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began
|
|
|
|
|
to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his
|
|
|
|
|
sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The language was
|
|
|
|
|
finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of The Art of Computer Programming
|
|
|
|
|
is not expected to appear until 2007. The impact and influence of TeX's
|
|
|
|
|
design has been such that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish
|
|
|
|
|
projects have started as a bit of toolsmith ing on the way to something
|
|
|
|
|
else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than most. TeX has
|
|
|
|
|
also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but high-quality software.
|
|
|
|
|
Knuth offers a monetary award to anyone who found and reported bugs dating
|
|
|
|
|
from before the 1989 code freeze; as the years wore on and the few remaining
|
|
|
|
|
bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the bribe went up.
|
|
|
|
|
Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge technique)
|
|
|
|
|
that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal system it
|
|
|
|
|
has been compiled with.
|
|
|
|
|
|
