10.1 Introduction

TeX (pronounced "tek") is a text-processing system that makes it easy to create professionally formatted documents. Donald Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University, created TeX. Knuth was dissatisfied with the quality of the typesetting in his published book, The Art of Computer Programming. To remedy the limitations of the manual typesetting processes in use at the time (the middle 1970s), Knuth resolved to create a program that would allow documents to be typeset electronically. He first started work on TeX in 1977, and the first version was completed in 1979. Knuth continued to develop and refine TeX until 1990, when he officially declared the source code to be frozen.

Today, TeX is widely used in many contexts where high-quality printed output is important. TeX provides a set of commands for specifying the precise details of a document's typeset appearance. There are commands, for example, to insert a fixed amount of vertical or horizontal space, to determine the indentation of paragraphs or the alignment of text, to specify the font style, and so on. TeX automatically handles many subtle details of typesetting, such as the kerning or ligature of fonts, hyphenation, and linebreaking. However, the author can also control each of these properties explicitly by using specific TeX commands.

The process of creating a document using TeX involves...