A Beginner's Book of TeX

Chapter 1: What is TeX?...........1

1.1 The Birth of TeX...........1

1.2 How TeX Works...........2

1.3 The good news and the bad news about TeX...........4

1.4 TeX: who and what for?...........7

1.5 TeX processing: an overview...........8

1.6 Looking ahead...........10

1.7 Creating a master file...........13

1.8 Error messages...........14

Chapter 2: The characters of TeX...........17

2.1 Characters that are special to TeX...........17

2.2 Quotes...........18

2.3 Ligatures and special characters...........19

2.4 Accents...........20

2.5 Two exercises...........21

Chapter 3: Groups and modes...........22

3.1 Groups...........22

3.2 Modes...........24

3.3 For the aspiring wizard...........26

Chapter 4: The fonts TeX uses...........27

4.1 TeX's fonts...........27

4.2 Preloaded fonts...........27

4.3 Loading other fonts...........28

4.4 A cornucopia of fonts...........29

4.5 Scaling of fonts...........30

4.6 Global scaling...........31

4.7 For the aspiring wizard...........32

4.8 Exercise...........37

Chapter 5: Spacing, glue and springs...........38

5.1 Horizontal spacing...........38

5.2 Vertical spacing...........40

5.3 Glue, or, spaces that stretch and shrink...........40

5.4 Springs...........42

5.5 Spacing and breaks...........44

5.6 Summary of basic spacing commands...........45

5.7 Spacing between paragraphs...........45

5.8 More springlike creatures...........46

5.9 Leaders in their full glory...........47

5.10 For the experienced user...........47

5.11 Exercise...........49

Chapter 6: Paragraphs...........52

6.1 Beginning and ending a paragraph...........52

6.2 What's in a paragraph...........53

6.3 Automatic indentation...........53

6.4 Obeying lines...........53

6.5 Left and right margins...........54

6.6 Ragged margins...........55

6.7 Quotations...........57

6.8 Centering of text...........57

6.9 Series of items...........58

6.10 More on hanging indentation...........60

6.11 Paragraphs with fancy shapes...........60

6.12 Footnote...........61

6.13 Two new macros for the aspiring wizard...........62

Chapter 7: Page layout...........64

7.1 Page layout in plain TeX...........64

7.2 A more elaborate layout...........65

7.3 The title page...........68

7.4 Starting a fresh page and leaving a blank page...........69

7.5 Placing a title...........69

7.6 Choosing line and page breaks by hand...........70

7.7 Floats...........70

7.8 A complete example...........71

7.9 Penalties: or, the carrot and the stick...........75

Chapter 8: Boxes...........78

8.1 What is a box?...........78

8.2 Putting boxes together...........79

8.3 What goes in a box...........80

8.4 Creating a box: summary...........83

8.5 Storing a box...........84

8.6 The baseline...........86

8.7 The dimensions of a box...........88

8.8 Some practical situations...........89

8.9 Spacing between boxes...........93

8.10 Rules...........94

8.11 More practical examples...........97

8.12 For the aspiring wizard...........98

Chapter 9: Alignments...........102

9.1 The preamble, a.k.a. recipe...........103

9.2 Simple alignments...........103

9.3 Some practical suggestions...........105

9.4 Treating special cases...........106

9.5 Excessively wise entries...........108

9.6 Inserting material between rows...........108

9.7 Combining columns...........110

9.8 Aligning digits...........111

9.9 Horizontal rules and spacing...........112

9.10 Vertical rules...........114

9.11 Braces and tables...........116

9.12 Fixing the width of an alignment...........117

9.13 Vertical alignments...........119

Chapter 10: Tabbing...........122

10.1 Setting tabs...........122

10.2 Centering...........123

10.3 Choosing column widths...........124

10.4 Equally spaced tabs...........124

10.5 Clearing tabs...........124

10.6 Tabs and rules...........125

10.7 Tabs and springs...........127

10.8 Typesetting code...........128

10.9 Tabs and alignments: a comparison...........129

Chapter 11: Typesetting mathematics...........130

11.1 Generalities...........130

11.2 Math symbols...........131

11.3 Fonts in math mode...........135

11.4 Subscripts and superscripts...........136

11.5 Accents...........137

11.6 Spacing in math mode...........138

11.7 The four styles...........138

11.8 Function names...........140

11.9 Fractions...........140

11.10 Large operators and limits...........142

11.11 Radicals...........144

11.12 Horizontally extensible symbols...........145

11.13 Vertically extensible symbols...........146

11.14 Stacking up symbols...........148

11.15 Combining relations...........149

11.16 More custom-made symbols: limits...........150

11.17 Phantoms...........151

11.18 Displaying several formulas...........152

11.19 Aligning several formulas...........154

11.20 Labeling formulas...........155

11.21 Matrices...........157

11.22 Adjusting the spacing...........159

11.23 Ellipses...........160

11.24 Diagrams...........161

Chapter 12: TeX programming...........164

12.1 Generalities...........164

12.2 Abbreviations and clones...........166

12.3 Macros with arguments...........167

12.4 Fine points of macro syntax...........169

12.5 Category codes...........172

12.6 Active characters...........173

12.7 How TeX reads and stores your text...........176

12.8 Registers...........178

12.9 Conditionals...........183

12.10 For the aspiring wizard...........186

Chapter 13: Dictionary and Index...........191

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