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Glossary of TeX terms

TeX forms a large system, and has many components. In addition, it is related to many other areas of the software landscape. All of the parts can be confusing.

You can jump straight to the first letter of the definition that you want.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

  • Acrobat Reader A viewer for PDF files. Acrobat Reader is produced by the Adobe company, and is available for free download for most computers. Adobe wrote the PDF standard and so this viewer is often considered the natural one to use.

B

  • BibTeX A system for producing bibliographies.

D

  • DVI An acronym for DeVice Independent. This is TeX's native output format. The DVI file that is produced by running TeX will usually then be converted to a format suitable for a specific screen viewer or printer. For example, the dvips program converts a DVI file into a format that can be used by a PostScript printer.
  • dvips A widely-used program for converting TeX's native output format DVI to a form that can be used by printers that use the popular PostScript language. It is full-featured, and in wide use for many years.

F

L

  • LaTeX The most popular macro package for TeX. It provides many convienent features such as automatic cross-references, footnotes, glossary, table of contents, and bibliographic features. It also encourages authors to separate the content of the document from the presentation aspects. Many style files are available that provide more features.

P

  • PDF A document format defined by the Adobe corporation. It allows typographic excellence, and has a definition that is an open standard which, along with some other features, has helped it to be widely used on the World Wide Web. It is often used as the output format for TeX documents that will be kept online. See pdfTeX.
  • pdfLaTeX See pdfTeX.
  • pdfTeX A program that can processes TeX input files and produce PDF output. (It need not go through the intermediate DVI file.) In addition, it can provide some typographical features that are not built into TeX. Note that there is an affiliated pdfLaTeX program that processes LaTeX input files.
  • PostScript A language for printers, defined by the Adobe corporation. It is quite popular, although it is being overtaken as a standard by Adobe's sucessor language PDF.

S

  • SliTeX The facility that comes with LaTeX for making overhead slides (often called "foils"). Note: More capable packages exist now, that someone making a new document should consider instead.
  • style files A file that can be input into plain TeX, LaTeX, or other TeX format to modify its default behavior. For instance, the file ulem.sty can be used in LaTeX to cause text that is tagged as to be emphasized (with: the next text is \emph{emphasized}) to come out underlined. For LaTeX alone there are hundreds of style files on CTAN, able to do a very wide range of things.

T

  • TeX format A file of commands that adapt the underlying TeX engine for use. The most popular format is LaTeX, but there are others. The format file can be compiled for faster loading.