TEX in Practice Volume 1: Basics

TEX has always been regarded as the most elegant and powerful system for computer typesetting. However, its widespread use, beyond academia, was hampered by its complexity. Recently, fairly good TEX implementations have come out for PCs putting TEX on the desks of many people: writers, designers, desktop publishers, engineers, and consequently, the interest in TEX has surged. What is needed at this point is a book that teaches step-by-step how to use TEX, illustrating each step by meaningful examples. This is exactly what S.v. Bechtolsheim's book does. It is a tutorial and guide for the first-time users of TEX, as well as a reference for the most experienced "TEXpert." TEX in Practice will appear as a four volume set, starting with volume 1 Basics, followed by volume 2 Paragraphs, Math and Fonts, volume 3 Tokens, Macros and volume 4 Output Routines, Tables. TEX in Practice will be an indispensable reference for the TEX community and a guide through the first steps for the TEX novice.

1 Before We Get Started.- 1.1 What Is TEX?.- 1.2 Complexity and Power of Systems.- 1.3 Summary.- 2 Processing with TEX.- 2.1 Properties and Capabilities of TEX.- 2.2 Macros, Macro Packages and Formats.- 2.3 Files Accessed by TEX.- 2.4 Preparations for Using TEX Efficiently.- 2.5 Utilities.- 2.6 Information about TEX.- 2.7 Entering Text.- 2.8 The Space, Tab and End-of-Line Characters.- 2.9 Organizing Your TEX Sources.- 2.10 How to Experiment with TEX.- 2.11 Summary.- 3 Registers, Numbers, and Counter Registers In Particular.- 3.1 Registers in General.- 3.2 Register Arithmetic.- 3.3 Numbers and Counter Registers in TEX.- 3.4 Generic Counter Register Macros.- 3.5 Summary.- 4 More on Registers, Dimensions.- 4.1 Dimensions and Dimension Units.- 4.2 Glue Registers.- 4.3 Math Glue Registers.- 4.4 Mixing Counter, Dimension and Glue Registers.- 4.5 Box Registers.- 4.6 Summary of the \new… Macros.- 4.7 Dumping All Parameters into the Logfile.- 4.8 Summary.- 5 Glue, Leaders and Rules.- 5.1 Basic Properties of Glue.- 5.2 Horizontal Glue.- 5.3 Badness of Boxes.- 5.4 Glue with Infinite Stretchability and Shrinkability.- 5.5 Vertical Glue, \vskip.- 5.6 Leaders.- 5.7 Rules.- 5.8 Penalties.- 5.9 Summary.- 6 Boxes.- 6.1 Basics About Boxes, Box Types.- 6.2 Horizontal Boxes (Hboxes).- 6.3 Examples of Building Horizontal Boxes.- 6.4 Determining the Dimensions of Hboxes.- 6.5 Hboxes of Zero or Nearly Zero Width, \hbox to Opt {…}.- 6.6 \…line Macros \line, \leftline, \rightline and \centerline.- 6.7 Generating More Hboxes.- 6.8 A Table Generated with Hboxes.- 6.9 Building Tables Using \settabs.- 6.10 More Hbox Examples.- 6.11 \hidevidth.- 6.12 Infinite Glues and Hboxes.- 6.13 Token Parameters \everyhbox and \everyvbox.- 6.14 Summary.- 7 Vertical Boxes.- 7.1 Basics of Vertical Boxes.-7.2 Building Simple Vboxes.- 7.3 Line Spacing and Interline Glue.- 7.4 Struts.- 7.5 The Dimensions of Vboxes.- 7.6 Summary.- 8 More on Vertical Boxes.- 8.1 Unwrapping Boxes Using \un… Primitives.- 8.2 Splitting Vboxes, \vsplit.- 8.3 Making a Box Larger, \BoxLarger.- 8.4 Another More Complicated Vbox Example.- 8.5 Removing Items from a Box Related List.- 8.6 Vertical Spacing Macros.- 8.7 Summary.- 9 Boxes and Rules.- 9.1 Rule Placement and Borderline of Boxes.- 9.2 Macros to Draw Simple Graphs.- 9.3 Drawing Rules Around a Box.- 9.4 Summary.- Source Code File Index.