Developer(s) | Donald Knuth |
---|---|
Initial release | 1978 |
Stable release |
3.14159265 / January 2014
|
Repository | www |
Development status | Maintained |
Written in | WEB/Pascal |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | Typesetting |
License | Permissive free software |
Website | tug |
Filename extension | .tex |
---|---|
Internet media type | application/x-tex |
Initial release | 1978 |
Type of format | Document file format |
TeX (/ˈtɛx/ or /ˈtɛk/, see below) is a typesetting system (or "formatting system") designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces, TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time. TeX is free software, which has made it more accessible to a wider range of users.
TeX is a popular means by which to typeset complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems in the world. TeX is popular in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, engineering, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatting system, in many Unix installations, which use both for different purposes. It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other template packages. The widely used MIME type for TeX is application/x-tex
. Within the typesetting system, its name is stylized as TeX.