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.
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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.
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BibTeX
A system for producing bibliographies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
-
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.
-
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.