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