TEX

What Hacker News says

1. pmkaryAug 2026
   I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood the he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:

   I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood that he had developed that masterwork of TeX to make his book, I immediately went to read it. There, in page four he writes:

   > Book printing differs significantly from ordinary typing with respect to

   > dashes, hyphens, and minus signs. In good math books, these symbols are all

   > different; in fact there usually are at least four different symbols:

   >

   > a hyphen (-);

   > an en-dash (–);

   > an em-dash (—);

   > a minus sign (−).

   >

   > Hyphens are used for compound words like ‘daughter-in-law’ and ‘X-rated’. En-

   > dashes are used for number ranges like ‘pages 13–34’, and also in contexts like

   > ‘exercise 1.2.6–52’. Em-dashes are used for punctuation in sentences—they are

   > what we often call simply dashes. And minus signs are used in formulas. A

   > conscientious user of T E X will be careful to distinguish these four usages, and

   > here is how to do it:

   >

   > for a hyphen, type a hyphen (-);

   > for an en-dash, type two hyphens (--);

   > for an em-dash, type three hyphens (---);

   > for a minus sign, type a hyphen in mathematics mode ($-$).

   So I kept using the beautiful em dash ever since; because that is how the greats do it.

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2. todd8Nov 2019
   Others have already described TeX quite well. One important feature not mentioned is that it is virtually error free now and is frozen at version 3.14159... (yes pi)

   Donald Knuth decided that there is value in having a system that for all time will produce exactly the output the author intended 20 years or 200 years later.

   Every TeX system will layout a document in exactly the same way within the limits of the output device—internally TeX computes positions with fixed point arithmetic at units smaller than light wavelengths.

   There is a tremendous ecosystem that runs on top of TeX written in the TeX macro based language. This includes the popular LaTeX system, hundreds of packages including tools for example to typeset musical scores, chess articles, and everything else you can imagine. Do note that some of these packages are very high quality—many comercial books in difficult to typeset subject like Physics, Mathematics, and CS are written using TeX.

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3. fxfanApr 2019
   EDIT: Release notes: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#

   One technology that has stood the test of time- amazingly well designed TeX by Donald Knuth and LaTeX by Leslie Lamport.

   Plain TeX can be a bit beginner unfriendly because most beginners use LaTeX and experienced people have their own 'coding style' but it's amazingly powerful.

   I only wish somebody would add the minimum required primitives to plain TeX to render reflowable text in browsers and ebook readers

   TeX was designed for "beautiful" typesetting but it gives you much more control than that IMHO. I'd urge everyone to try it out once, I use it offline but I think overleaf.com allows for plain TeX too. (XeTeX may work best for unicode, it's plain tex + minimal additions for Unicode)

   On that note- I am not fond of PDFs because of their awfully poor unicode search support- does anybody knowledgeable know of a good target format I should use (and the appropriate drivers?)

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4. jordighDec 2018
   Donald Knuth shaved the ultimate yak. He wanted to write a book with mathematics in it so he implemented what for decades has been industry-standard mathematical typesetting system: TeX.

   That's remarkable. I just wish he'd finish the book.

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5. svatNov 2017
   To the contrary, TeX (not LaTeX) has one of the best error-handling and error-recovery interfaces of any commandline program — if you use TeX as Knuth intended, that is, if you use plain TeX at the commandline and if you have read the entertaining chapters in The TeXbook on dealing with errors. Just try using plain TeX (not LaTeX) for a few months and you'll find that the behaviour when errors happen is one of its delights, the opposite experience from when you use LaTeX. (Of course, you may miss many conveniences from LaTeX, but the error experience is itself almost worth the change.)

   Knuth has done a great job that should be the model for all other software writers: every error is described in two ways, one somewhat formal and one somewhat informal, and every error is shown with enough context (and this is configurable too) for you to quickly see what the issue is, and you can even fix errors without having to abort the compilation. He has a great talk where he describes how the English language is optimized for dialogue (things like "I" and "you") and TeX messages are designed in that way.

   Unfortunately, LaTeX consists of several layers of complicated macros (all in the name of making things convenient for, and hiding things from, the user) and as they (correctly) decide that all these layers won't make sense to the user, they actually turn off all the context that goes with the error, leading to error messages that are incomprehensible even to experts. But I don't think it's right to blame the fact that LaTeX didn't bother to implement good error-recovery on TeX.

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6. graycatSep 2017
   > No LaTeX, extremely minimal bibliography.

   I prefer TeX! And I've published applied math with just TeX, sent to Information Sciences, an Elsevier journal, and they handled the TeX source easily!

   I prefer TeX because Knuth's book is shorter and easier to read than the books on LaTeX.

   Yes, for TeX I wrote about 100 macros for table of contents, cross references, help with bibliographies, ordered, unordered, and simple lists, boxes around text, etc.

   So, it's not all just LaTeX guys -- TeX is still darned nice!

   Nothing comes between me and my TeX!

   Give up TeX? It will have to be pried out of my cold, dead fingers!

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