LaTeX Part 1 - History Guys on FOSS
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- Technologies
Throughout history there have been people who identify a problem, and instead of idly accepting the situation, they produce a solution. These are people like Henry Ford who noticed the inefficiency of automobile production and invented the assembly line, a standard in modern manufacturing. Or perhaps we consider Bette Nesmith Graham, painter and more importantly white out inventor. She saw a common problem and instead of just chucking out entire sheets of typing she set out to fix the problem. Often these innovators do not realize the full potential of their solution to one problem. Who doesn't have a can or two of WD-40 in their house? This was originally a product to solve a specific space related problem, but it is now used on everything from zippers to distributer caps. There is another case in which a project was designed due to solve a daily irritation which took off quite dramatically. Of course I am talking about the subject of this article: TeX and more specifically LaTeX. To understand where LaTeX came from we must first examine it's foundation, TeX (pronounced tɛk). TeX was invented by a man by the name of Donald E. Knuth. Donald was growing frustrated with the current typesetting practices in the 70's. In fact his own book, The Art of Computer Programming, was re-published in the 70's he found the typesetting to be hideous. A few months later Knuth decided that he would not accept the situation idly and set out to produce TeX. The project was started in 1977 and Knuth predicted that he'd be able to finish it in one year. His estimate was off by about 10 years. However, Knuth's system did not really take off until the invention of a macro package called LaTeX. LaTeX was invented by a man named Lamport as a way for the user to concentrate on the writing instead of the formatting. Think C instead of Assembly. Today if you were to start writing a book in TeX, you'd most likely use LaTeX. It does a bunch of automatic formatting by section, chapter, etc. in order to make the document as readable as possible. This system really lets the author focus on the content, and then make stylistic changes later. Next article: Plain TeX vs LaTeX Very Useful Links:Big Online LaTeX Beginner's guide Nice PDF for LaTeX BeginnersNice PDF for Plain TeX BeginnersWikiBook on LaTeXHistoryWiki pages: LaTeX TeX -The Thoth-
Throughout history there have been people who identify a problem, and instead of idly accepting the situation, they produce a solution. These are people like Henry Ford who noticed the inefficiency of automobile production and invented the assembly line, a standard in modern manufacturing. Or perhaps we consider Bette Nesmith Graham, painter and more importantly white out inventor. She saw a common problem and instead of just chucking out entire sheets of typing she set out to fix the problem. Often these innovators do not realize the full potential of their solution to one problem. Who doesn't have a can or two of WD-40 in their house? This was originally a product to solve a specific space related problem, but it is now used on everything from zippers to distributer caps. There is another case in which a project was designed due to solve a daily irritation which took off quite dramatically. Of course I am talking about the subject of this article: TeX and more specifically LaTeX. To understand where LaTeX came from we must first examine it's foundation, TeX (pronounced tɛk). TeX was invented by a man by the name of Donald E. Knuth. Donald was growing frustrated with the current typesetting practices in the 70's. In fact his own book, The Art of Computer Programming, was re-published in the 70's he found the typesetting to be hideous. A few months later Knuth decided that he would not accept the situation idly and set out to produce TeX. The project was started in 1977 and Knuth predicted that he'd be able to finish it in one year. His estimate was off by about 10 years. However, Knuth's system did not really take off until the invention of a macro package called LaTeX. LaTeX was invented by a man named Lamport as a way for the user to concentrate on the writing instead of the formatting. Think C instead of Assembly. Today if you were to start writing a book in TeX, you'd most likely use LaTeX. It does a bunch of automatic formatting by section, chapter, etc. in order to make the document as readable as possible. This system really lets the author focus on the content, and then make stylistic changes later. Next article: Plain TeX vs LaTeX Very Useful Links:Big Online LaTeX Beginner's guide Nice PDF for LaTeX BeginnersNice PDF for Plain TeX BeginnersWikiBook on LaTeXHistoryWiki pages: LaTeX TeX -The Thoth-