The personal computer has in many ways put a lot of power into the hands of ordinary people. This is especially true of publishing. Whereas you once needed tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to do any sort of publishing, now all you need is some over-the-counter software and a printer.

The desktop publishing programs you find at your favourite software store are a mixed bag. Some, like Microsoft Publisher, are rudimentary. Others, like FrameMaker and QuarkXpress, are expensive and require powerful processors and a lot of memory in order to run.

One option that people either ignore or don't know about is TeX.

What is TeX?

TeX (pronounced "tek") is the brainchild of Stanford professor Donald Knuth. Annoyed at the way in which his books on mathematics were being typeset, Knuth took matters into his own hands. The result was a typesetting system that produces high-quality documents with the minimum of effort.

TeX itself is a freely-available group of programs, fonts, supporting files, and processes that produce beautifully typeset pages. Aspects of the pages, like justification, inter-word spacing, hyphenation, etc. are handled automatically. There's no need for any manual fiddling.

Creating Documents

For TeX to create these pages, you have to fashion an input file containing the text to typeset, as well as the commands that tell TeX how the document will look. These commands perform the same function as tags in HTML and SGML. The file is then run through TeX, which produces what is called a DVI (DeVice Independent) file is output. The DVI file contains instructions for a variety of output devices, from printers and photo typesetters, to dedicated DVI file viewers. There are even tools for converting DVI files to other formats, like PostScript. There are also tools for converting TeX files directly to HTML and Acrobat PDF.

Because of its power and flexibility, TeX is widely used in scientific publishing. But that doesn't mean you can't produce other documents with it. You can use TeX to author and typeset books, articles, reports, letters, brochures, and business cards. With a few add-ons, you can even output sheet music and slides for presentations.