TEX by topic

What Hacker News says

1. mananaysiempreMar 2023
   > However, it can be tough finding documentation how to use plain TeX.

   I hate to be that guy, but... the TeXbook works and recently (finally!) had an official ebook release, illustrations and all. It’s a peculiar value of “works”—personally, I had to be stuck home sick for a couple of weeks with no reading material to get through it from beginning to end, it doesn’t really start to get rewarding unless you get through at least half of it or so, and I went away from it thinking that I like neither Knuth’s way of writing nor his approach to programming language design (“computers follow rules”). But it still has a lot of helpful stuff.

   When it comes to more systematic descriptions and connections with more conventional programming-language ideas (it took me some time to recognize that TeX uses what is essentially dynamic scope throughout), I like TeX by Topic[1].

   [1] https://www.eijkhout.net/tex/tex-by-topic.html

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2. dhosekMay 2022
   There are three books that are worth looking at to get plain TeX. I’d start with Viktor Eijkhout’s TeX by Topic (which I think is free in PDF on CTAN). Then the TeXbook to really get everything (the PDFs that float around the net are illegal. Please buy your copy. DEK donated his royalties to TUG so your purchase will help support the continuation of things like CTAN and the LaTeX project). And finally, if you really want to dig deep, Stephan v. Bechtolsheim’s four-volume magnum opus, TeX in Practice will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.
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3. microtherionJan 2015
   If you're interested in those details, Victor Eijkhout's TeX by Topic is very instructive as well: http://www.eijkhout.net/texbytopic/texbytopic.html
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4. EliRiversMay 2019
   Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was.

   Definitely. I've had interviewers start by thanking me for my CV being well-formatted and also short.

   Ha. I've just noticed that as I type this, I have literally in front of me on my desk Eijkhout's "Tex by Topic", Lamport's latex book and "The Latex Companion" by Goosens et al. This must be where I do most of my pretty document making.

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5. svatJan 2018
   I wonder whether this is the right approach. TeX itself is one of the most heavily documented programs in existence. Not only are its workings documented in detail in The TeXbook (and a host of other books by other authors, such as Eijkhout's TeX by Topic) but even the program itself has been written in a “literate programming” style, with pretty formatted source code (with profuse comments) available in print (Vol B of Computers and Typesetting) and as a PDF (http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/tex/tex.pdf), there's a detailed history/retrospective and log of every change that went into the program (see Chapters 10 and 11 of the book Literate Programming, though the log without explanation is also available online http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorl...), and there are even 12 hours of video of Knuth talking about the internals of the program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbqY1mTwrj8&index=12&list=PL...).

   So when the article says:

   > To reproduce all of LaTeX in the browser is too much to ask

   I wonder why? The file tex.web is less than 25000 lines long, much of it comments, so I'd estimate that TeX itself is only about 20000 sloc (in fact tangle on tex.web generates a Pascal file tex.p which is only 6115 lines long). This is not a lot IMO, and it would be a lot better to actually re-implement this, with additional support for things like getting the parse tree etc.

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