page_title: TeX
section_title: How it is run
hierarchical_section_title: TeX / Typesetting system / How it is run
caption_attribution_description: English: A sample page of LaTeX, rasterized into a nice, antialiased PNG by dvipng. dvipng.exe LaTeX_sample.dvi -Q9 -D150 -T8.5in,11in -O1in,1in
context_page_description: TeX, stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system which was designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
  TeX is popular in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, engineering, linguistics, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatting system, in many Unix installations which use both for different purposes. It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of 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. TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.
context_section_description: A sample Hello world program in plain TeX is:
  Hello, World
  \bye          % marks the end of the file; not shown in the final output
  This might be in a file myfile.tex, as .tex is a common file extension for plain TeX files. By default, everything that follows a percent sign on a line is a comment, ignored by TeX. Running TeX on this file (for example, by typing tex myfile.tex in a command-line interpreter, or by calling it from a graphical user interface) will create an output file called myfile.dvi, representing the content of the page in a device independent format (DVI). A DVI file could then either be viewed on screen or converted to a suitable format for any of the various printers for which a device driver existed (printer support was generally not an operating system feature at the time that TeX was created). Knuth has said that there is nothing inherent in TeX that requires DVI as the output format, and later versions of TeX, notably pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, all support output directly to PDF.
caption: A sample page produced using TeX with the LaTeX macros
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