TeX is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth, primarily designed to ensure consistent results across different computers and to enable the production of high-quality books. The system is divided into several levels that transform a stream of characters into formatted pages.
To provide a system that give the same results on all computers
TEX
Used for:
Economics
Science
Engineering
Physics
Statistics
Quantitative psychology
Academia
Digital Typographical
Complex Mathematical Formulae
Donald Knuth
Designed and mostly written and released in 1978
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Use
The read-write system can be divided into four levels:
It breaks the vertical list of lines and other material into pages.
The stream of characters get assembled into a paragraph.
Expandable control sequences are replaced by their replacement text.
Characters are read from the input file and assigned a category code
TeX input is hard to parse by anything but TeX itself.TeX is a macro and tokenbased language: many commands, including most userdefined ones.
TeX commands commonly start with a backslash and are grouped with curly braces.
Story
In 1989, Donald Knuth released new versions of TeX and METAFONT. Despite his desire to keep the program stable, Knuth realised that 128 different characters for the text input were not enough to accommodate foreign languages.
Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of 1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX.
When Steele rewrote TeX's I/O to run under the ITS operating system.
On 13 May 1977, he wrote a memo to himself describing the basic features of TeX. He planned to finish it on his sabbatical in 1978, but as it happened the language was not frozen until 1989, more than ten years later.
The disappointing galley proofs gave him the final motivation to solve the problem at hand once and for all by designing his own typesetting system.
This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "good classic style" appreciated by Knuth. Around that time, Knuth saw for the first time the output of a high-quality digital typesetting system, and became interested in digital typography.
When the first volume of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published in 1969, it was typeset using hot metal typesetting set by a Monotype Corporation typecaster.
