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Manual page for TEX(1L)

tex, initex, virtex - text formatting and typesetting

SYNOPSIS

tex [ first line ]

initex [ first line ]

virtex [ first line ]

DESCRIPTION

TEX on the NeXT computer system must be installed before its first use. It's available on the NEXTSTEP Release 3 CD-ROM, in a package named NeXTTeX.

TEX formats the interspersed text and commands contained in the named files and outputs a typesetter independent file (called DVI which is short for DeVice Independent). TEX capabilities and language are described in The TEXbook by Donald E. Knuth, published by Addison-Wesley. There is also an older manual, TEX and METAFONT, which describes the older version of TEX, now called TEX78, but this description is now obsolete. The present version of TEX (often refered to internally as TEX82) incorporates literally hundreds of changes from this older version.

Any arguments given on the command line to the TEX programs are passed to them as the first input line. As described in The TEXbook, that line should begin with a file name or a \controlsequence. The normal usage is to say ``tex paper'' to start processing paper.tex. The name ``paper'' will be the ``jobname'', and is used in forming output file names. If TEX doesn't get a file name in the first line, the jobname is ``texput''. The default `.tex' extension can be overridden by specifying an extension explicitly.

If there is no paper.tex in the current directory, TEX will look look through a search path of directories to try to find it. The standard library on the default search path has the basic format package, plain.tex, described in the TEXbook, as well as several others. Note that it is hardly ever necessary to \input plain, since the tex program has preloaded it. This means that all of the control sequences discussed in the TEXbook are known to TEX.

The output DVI file is written on name.dvi where name is the jobname. A log of error messages goes into name.log.

Note that there have been incompatible changes in the DVI format between TEX78 and TEX82, so programs used to print TEX78 output will not work for TEX82. A number of output drivers are available. Ask your local TEX guru for information on what one you should use.

There are some environment variables that can be used to set up directory paths to search when TEX opens a file for input. For example, the csh command
setenv TEXINPUTS .:/usr/me/mylib:/usr/lib/tex/inputs or the sh command sequence
TEXINPUTS=.:/usr/me/mylib:/usr/lib/tex/inputs
export TEXINPUTS
would cause all invocations of tex and its derivatives to look for \input files first in the current directory, then in a hypothetical user's ``mylib'', and finally in the system library. Normally, the user will place the command sequence which sets up the TEXINPUTS environment variable in the .cshrc or .profile file. The Environment section below lists the relevant environment variables, and their defaults.

The e response to TEX's error prompt causes the vi editor to start up at the current line of the current file. There is an environment variable, TEXEDIT, that can be used to change the editor used. It should contain a string with "%s" indicating where the filename goes and "%d" indicating where the decimal linenumber (if any) goes. For example, a TEXEDIT string for (Gosling's) emacs can be set by:

setenv TEXEDIT "/usr/bin/emacs -l/usr/lib/tex82/tex-start -estartline %d %s"
(replacing the path name for the emacs as appropriate on your system).

A convenient file in the library is null.tex, containing nothing. When tex can't find a file it thinks you want to input, it keeps asking you for another file name; responding `null' gets you out of the loop if you don't want to input anything.

Two other TEX programs, initex and virtex, can be used to create fast-loading customized versions of TEX. The initex program is used to create a format (.fmt) file that permits fast loading of fonts and macro packages. After processing the fonts and definitions desired, a \dump command will create the format file. The format file is used by virtex. It needs to be given a format file name as the first thing it reads. A format file name is preceded by an &, which needs to be escaped with \ if given on the command line. So, for instance, one could create a file myfmt.fmt using initex, and then set up a cshell alias with

alias mytex "virtex \&myfmt"
to allow the use of ``mytex paper''.

ENVIRONMENT

The defaults for all environments are set at the time of compilation, by reference to a file called site.h. The values given below are preset in this file, and may be different at some sites.

TEXINPUTS: Search path for \input and \openin files. It should be colon-separated, and start with ``.''. The entire path must be no longer than 700 characters long. Default: .:/usr/lib/tex/inputs
TEXFONTS: Search path for font metric files. The entire path must be no longer than 100 characters long. The default doesn't include the current area (".") to avoid confusing the programs that convert the output for printing on the various output devices (most of which don't know about the path stuff yet). Default: /usr/lib/tex/fonts
TEXFORMATS: Search path for format files. Default: .:/usr/lib/tex
TEXPOOL: Search path for TEX strings. Default: .:/usr/lib/tex
TEXEDIT: Command template for switching to editor. Default: "/usr/bin/emacs +%d %s"

FILES

/usr/lib/tex: TEX's library area
/usr/lib/tex/tex.pool: Encoded text of TEX's messages
/usr/lib/tex/fonts: TEX's fonts and width tables
/usr/lib/tex/fonts/*.*[gf,pk]: Bit maps for low resolution devices. This is very dependent on the organization of the local system
/usr/lib/tex/fonts/*.tfm: Width information used by TEX (TEX Font Metric files)
/usr/lib/tex/inputs: TEX .fmt files
/usr/lib/tex/inputs/plain.*: The ``default'' macro package

TRIVIA

TEX, pronounced properly, rhymes with ``blecchhh.'' Note that the proper spelling in typewriter-like output is ``TeX'' and not ``TEX'' or ``tex.''

BUGS

Maybe there should be character other than & to specify format files, since if you forget the \ on the command line, it doesn't do what you want! Also, there is no way to read a TEX input file with no filename extension.

AUTHORS

TEX was designed by Donald E. Knuth, who implemented it using his WEB system for Pascal programs. It was ported to Unix at Stanford by Howard Trickey, and at Cornell by Pavel Curtis. This version is a combination of their efforts.