Scientific workplace and scientific notebook version 3

TeX is a typesetting system written by Donald E. Knuth, who says in the preface to his book on TeX (Knuth (1984)) that it is “intended for the creation of beautiful books – and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics”. The ‘X’ stands for the Greek letter Chi, and is pronounced by English-speakers either a bit like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’ or like ‘k’. It definitely is not pronounced ‘ks’. To clarify matters further, Knuth is pronounced Ka-NOOTH, according to Knuth himself. LaTeX is a TeX macro package, originally written by Leslie Lamport (Lamport (1992)), that provides a document processing system and allows markup to describe the structure of a document so that the user need not think about presentation, and by using document classes and add-on packages can produce the same document in a variety of different layouts. Lamport says that LaTeX “represents a balance between functionality and ease of use”.TeX and LaTeX are widely used in mathematics and science, and are also used specifically in economics (see, for example, Varian (1992), p. xiv and Varian (1999) p. xxiii). Many publishers have developed their own LaTeX styles for journals and books, and insist that authors stick closely to their markup. TeX is free, apparently because Knuth chose to make it so, though many commercial implementations exist. (This paragraph is abstracted from UK TeX User Group FAQ 1999).