TeX/LaTeX

Computer Typesetting Using LaTeX

LaTeX is a computer typesetting language, as opposed to a word processing application. It is typically used by academics and some people in industry and few in government for producing output that is indistinguishable from the output of a professional typographer. In fact, because the author actually cares whether or not there are typos, and about the beauty of the finished product, it often looks much better.

During the days of DOS, when it looked like OS/2 would be the next big operating system, Eberhard Mattes in Germany produced what was widely considered to be the best implementation of LaTeX for the microcomputer (as it was then called). His software, called, naturally enough, "emTeX" was also the basis of other distributions. They adapted emTeX for use with Win16 and even Win32 systems and were largely successful.

For reasons that I have yet to gather on the usenet newsgroups or by word of mouth, emTeX seems to be receding from the scene. It is still 16-bit and I have not heard of a 32-bit upgrade. However I still find a lot of hits on emTeX on the search engines. For 32-bit Windows systems now, however, MikTeX seems to be the distribution of choice, handling the long file names introduced by Windows 95.