A Beginner's Book of Tex - Tapa blanda

The last two decades have witnessed a revolution in the realm of typography, with the virtual disappearance of hot-lead typesetting in favor of the so-called digital typesetting. The principle behind the new technology is simple: imagine a very fine mesh superimposed on a sheet of paper. Digital typesetting consists in darkening the appropriate pixels (tiny squares) of this mesh, in patterns corresponding to each character and symbol of the text being set. The actual darkening is done by some printing device, say a laser printer or phototypesetter, which must be told exactly where the ink should go. Since the mesh is very fine-the dashes surrounding this sentence are some six pixels thick, and more than 200 pixels long-the printer can only be controlled by a computer program, which takes a "high-level" description of the page in terms of text, fonts, and formatting commands, and digests all of that into "low-level" commands for the printer. TEX is such a program, created by Donald E. Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University.

This book is a friendly introduction to TEX, the powerful typesetting system designed by Donald Knuth. It is addressed primarily to beginners, but it contains much information that will be useful to aspiring TEX "wizards". Moreover, the authors kept firmly in mind the diversity of backgrounds that characterizes TEX users: authors in the sciences and in the humanities, secretaries, technical typists... The book contains a careful explanation of all fundamental concepts and commands, but also a wealth of commented examples and "tricks" based on the authors' long experience with TEX. The attentive reader will quickly be able to create a table, or customize the appearance of the page, or code even the most complicated formula. The last third of the book is devoted to a Dictionary/Index, summarizing all the material in the text and going into greater depth in many areas.