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TeX ○˒｜Definition｜1st｜20260723154412-00-⌔
TeX
TeX (/tɛx/), stylized as TeX, is a free and open source software typesetting program that was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor Donald Knuth1 and first released in 1978. The term now refers to the system of extensions – which includes software programs called TeX engines, sets of TeX macros, and packages which provide extra typesetting functionality – built around the original TeX language. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.2
TeX is widely used in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, political science, engineering, linguistics, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. It has long since displaced Unix troff (the previously favored formatting system) in most Unix installations (although troff still remains as the default formatter of the UNIX documentation). It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially as the basis for LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other macro packages.
TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books with minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time (together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces).3 TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.
Printed 2026-07-23.
Link to original Footnotes
“Per Bothner (attendee at TeX Project meetings) discusses authorship”. Knuth definitely wrote most of the code himself, at least for the Metafont re-write, for which I have pe[r]sonal knowledge. However, some of his students (such as Michael Plass and John Hobby) did work on the algorithms used in TeX and Metafont. ↩
Yannis Haralambous. Fonts & Encodings (Translated by P. Scott Horne). Beijing; Sebastopol, Calif: O’Reilly Media, 2007, pp. 235. ↩
Gaudeul, Alexia (2006). “Do Open Source Developers Respond to Competition?: The (La)TeX Case Study”. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.908946. ISSN 1556-5068. ↩
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