Additions and corrections are always welcome, please email [email protected].
- FAQ and documentation:
- Free TeX implementations
- TeX engines and extensions
- Packages and programs
- TeX web projects
- BibTeX and bibliographies
- Commercial and shareware TeX vendors and projects
- Publisher-provided styles
- Publicity
- Miscellaneous
Introductions to the TeX world:
General TeX help:
If you have questions not answered by the above, here are some
general help resources for TeX (no guarantees, this is all done by
volunteers):
Basic LaTeX documentation:
CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network):
CTAN is a fundamental central point in
the TeX world. Some of its main pages:
Fonts
- Discussion of available fonts, both free and
proprietary.
- LaTeX Font Catalogue,
by Palle Jørgensen of DK-TUG,
has short samples of most fonts available in typical LaTeX installations.
- Essential NFSS
users guide by Sebastian Rahtz; see also Font selection in
LaTeX by Walter Schmidt, and fontspec, a package by Will
Robertson for using OpenType and other fonts in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
using NFSS.
- Luc Devroye's type design page (archived), with a staggering amount of
information on fonts of all kinds, samples, type designers,
typography, and more.
- The STIX web site, a
project for getting mathematical characters into Unicode, and creating
fonts with them. This article by
Barbara Beeton explains some of the background and issues. STIX and
XITS (enhanced derivative) are on
CTAN.
- Utilities for creating font support include
otftotfm
and otfinfo
in Eddie Kohler's
lcdf-typetools,
autoinst
in Marc Penninga's fontools
wrapping lcdf-typetools,
and Bob Tennent's article
on using them in practice.
- Fontname, a naming scheme for TeX fonts.
- Michael Sharpe's 2014
TUGboat article on additions to the TeX font repertoire, including
variants of Bembo, Garamond, Baskerville, and more.
- Prehistory of
digital fonts, an extensively illustrated history by
Jacques André.
General typography and typesetting:
Graphics:
Indexing:
Plain TeX:
- TeX by
Topic, A TeXnician's Reference, by Victor Eijkhout (Addison-Wesley,
1992; 307pp). Available under the GFDL.
- TeX for
the Impatient, by Paul Abrahams, Kathryn Hargreaves, and Karl Berry
(Addison-Wesley, 1990; 357pp). Available under the GFDL.
- A gentle
introduction to TeX, by Michael Doob (Greek
translation).
- Plain TeX documentation
topic on CTAN.
- Getting Started
with Plain TeX
and Summary of Commonly-Used Features of Plain TeX, by D.R. Wilkins.
- Reference
cards for AMSTeX and plain TeX, by Joseph Silverman.
- A Beginner's Book of TeX, by Silvio Levy and Raymond Seroul (Springer
Verlag, ISBN 0-387-97562-4).
- TeX for the Beginner, by Wynter Snow (Addison-Wesley, ISBN
0-201-54799-6).
- To proto vima sto TeX, Greek translation and enhancement
of TeX starting from square one, by Dimitrios
Filippou (Paratiritis Editions, ISBN 960-374-081-0, 2001).
- Most of all, The TeXbook
by Donald Knuth, the original manual for TeX, with both tutorial and
(comprehensive) reference information.
Overall TeX system:
- TDS, the TeX Directory
Structure standard, the common layout for TeX systems.
- A freely available book on the TeX system: Making TeX
Work,
by Norman Walsh (O'Reilly, 1994; 15 chapters, 6 appendices).
LaTeX tutorials and courses:
- Learning
resources for a LaTeX beginner, a tex.stackexchange.com
discussion page.
- Learning LaTeX online,
short lessons with examples that can be run entirely online.
Translated into several languages.
- A simple guide to LaTeX -
Step by step, short lessons with full code examples.
- LaTeX
beginners' course from UK-TUG.
- LaTeX
tutorials and information from Nicola Talbot.
- Getting
Started with LaTeX, a primer for text, math, and basic formatting.
- Spoken
(video) tutorials on LaTeX, and on XFig
with math, from spoken-tutorial.org.
- LaTeX
tutorials from Andy Roberts.
- Video
tutorial series on LaTeX from sharelatex.com.
- RUG LateX
Course, by Siep Kroonenberg, including book and practice files.
- LaTeX tutorials from TUGIndia,
the Indian TeX Users Group.
- Let's
Learn LaTeX by S. Parthasarathy.
Presentations about TeX:
LaTeX templates:
All of these collections would welcome additions and corrections.
LaTeX reference information:
LaTeX for particular fields:
Writing new LaTeX packages, classes, and styles:
Printed LaTeX books:
- The LaTeX Companion, by Frank Mittelbach,
with Ulrike Fischer (Addison-Wesley, third edition, 2023).
A two-volume opus covering the LaTeX world. Reviews.
- The LaTeX Cookbook,
by Stefan Kottwitz (Packt Publishing, second edition, 2024).
Buy on Amazon.
- Learning LaTeX,
by David Griffiths and Desmond Higham (SIAM, second edition, 2016).
A short example-based book covering core LaTeX and selected packages.
- A Guide to LaTeX2e, by
Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-17385-6,
fourth edition, 2003).
- Math into LaTeX, by George Grätzer, 6th edition.
- Typesetting
Mathematics with LaTeX, by Herbert Voß (UIT Cambridge, ISBN
978-1-906860-17-2, 2010, 304pp). A practical book on typesetting
mathematics with LaTeX, covering many packages.
- Typesetting
tables with LaTeX, by Herbert Voß (UIT Cambridge, ISBN
978-1-906860-25-7, 2011, 240pp). A practical book on typesetting
tables with LaTeX, covering many packages.
(La)TeX advocacy:
The TeX Family in 2009 article is
available online, originally published in AMS Notices magazine.
See also the list of TeX journals and
publications, and the AMS lists of
TeX resources and TeX-related
publications.
Some notable TeX implementations that are entirely, or least
primarily, free software:
- TeX Live is a distribution provided by
most TeX user groups which supports many Unix systems, MacOSX, and
Windows.
- MacTeX, TeX Live with additions and easy
installation for MacOSX.
- MiKTeX, an independent
distribution for Windows with a flexible package manager.
- proTeXt, MiKTeX with additions and
a thorough installation guide for Windows.
- KerTeX, from
Thierry Laronde, a TeX kernel system.
- Knoppix,
a live GNU/Linux system on a bootable CD that includes TeX.
- TeX-FPC, from
Wolfgang Helbig, change files for TeX to work with Free Pascal
compiler, along with installation scripts.
If you want to inspect Knuth's own sources for educational or other
such purposes, without any of the scaffolding, enhancements, and
extensions that have come to surround them in modern systems, you can
get them from Stanford;
the material is also mirrored on CTAN. In
addition, archives from
1977-1990 of the SAIL system on which Knuth developed TeX are
available from saildart.
TeX engines and extensions
- e-TeX(extended TeX).
Required by current LaTeX, incorporated in all common
executables except tex itself (run etex for plain
e-TeX). e-TeX
manual.
- pdfTeX,
a TeX extension which can directly produce PDF output as well as DVI.
Incorporates e-TeX.
- XeTeX and
LuaTeX and
(FAQ),
TeX implementations natively supporting Unicode and system fonts.
LuaTeX also offers embedded Lua scripting.
LaTeX, biggest and most
widely used TeX macro package.
ConTeXt, Hans Hagen's
powerful, extensive TeX macro package; a serious contender for those
wanting a production-quality publishing system. Integrated support for
XML, MetaPost, and much more. The ConTeXt Garden Wiki
is a good place
to start. Also, Aditya Mahajan writes regular introductory ConTeXt
articles for TUGboat:
fonts,
tables,
tables II,
indentations,
Unicode/OpenType math,
conditional processing (modes).
paper setup,
images.
Editors
Free editors and front-ends (see also vendors
below):
- Atom, a cross-platform text editor and its
LaTeXTools plugin.
- GNU Emacs
and especially its AUC-TeX
package.
- IPE, a drawing editor for
creating figures in PDF format.
- Kile for KDE/Linux.
- LaTeX Editor (LEd)
for Windows.
- LyX for Windows and X, a
well-developed front end for TeX.
- SciTe for Windows
and X, a free source code editor.
- Sublime Text, a sophisticated
general text editor, free for evaluation, and its LaTeXTools plugin.
- Texmaker, cross-platform.
- TeXStudio, cross-platform.
- TeXnicCenter for Windows,
an integrated environment for LaTeX composition.
- TeXShop, a
widely used free software TeX front end for MacOSX.
- TeXworks, a cross-platform front-end with
an ease-of-use philosophy similar to TeXShop, an integrated PDF viewer,
source/output synchronization, and more.
- Vim with
Vim-LaTeX, a
comprehensive TeX suite.
- Visual Studio Code, a
cross-platform editor from Microsoft; the VS Marketplace offers many
TeX extensions, such as LaTeX Workshop by James Yu.
- Winshell for Windows; this is a
zero-cost but proprietary editor.
- MAPS 46 (2015) contains reviews
of TeXShop, Textmate, TeXworks, TeXstudio, and SciTE.
Online references for other TeX-related software:
Packages and programs for making slide presentations:
Packages and programs dealing with graphics.
- graphics and
graphicx, the core LaTeX packages.
- bmpsize, Heiko Oberdiek's
package for finding bitmap bounding boxes; supports most bitmap formats.
PSTricks graphics:
- PSTricks home page, a widely-used graphics
package, maintained by Herbert Voß.
PGF/TikZ graphics:
Xy-pic graphics:
Other programs for creating graphics:
- asymptote, a
MetaPost replacement with a C++-like syntax and floating-point
numerics, by Andy Hammerlindl, John Bowman, and Tom Prince.
- ePiX,
Andy Hwang's C++-based graphics language.
- Eukleides, geometry diagrams
with output in pstricks, including graphical frontend
- Inkscape, a multi-platform
graphics editor based on SVG.
- IPE, a multi-platform
graphics editor.
- LaTeXPiX,
Windows program that generates LaTeX pictures.
- MetaPost, the derivation of Metafont for
technical drawings and PostScript output.
- TeXCAD,
a Windows program for drawing or retouching LaTeX {picture}s;
distributed under the GPL.
- TpX, a TeX drawing tool
for Windows.
- Xfig, a comprehensive drawing tool
for Unix with many options for (La)TeX and Metafont/MetaPost.
Formats and large macro packages:
- AMS-TeX and AMS-LaTeX , the American
Mathematical Society's TeX packages
- EDMAC, Dominik Wujastyk and John Lavagnino's package for typestting critical editions in
plain TeX
- Eplain, extended plain format
- LaTeX 3, new work from the LaTeX developers (news).
- The REVTeX package
- Shyster, James Popple's
case-based legal expert system which produces LaTeX output.
DVI drivers:
- dvips,
Tom Rokicki's widely-used dvi to PostScript driver
- xdvi,
Paul Vojta's widely-used DVI previewer for the X window system.
- xdvik,
the Kpathsea variant of xdvi.
- dvipdfmx,
extended version of Mark Wicks' original DVI to PDF converter,
by Shunsaku Hirata and Jin-Hwan Cho.
- dvisvgm,
for conversion to the W3C SVG (scalable vector graphics) format.
- dvii,
for looking at DVI files and summarizing the contents (fonts,
specials, etc.), by Adam H. Lewenberg.
PDF viewers (concentrating on free software):
- For Unix:
- xpdf, a standalone
PDF viewer and companion utilities.
- Impressive,
intended for doing slide presentations with several custom features.
- GNU gv, a simple
front-end to Ghostscript.
- Evince, a
document viewer for PDF (based on poppler), PostScript,
DVI, and more.
- GGV (Gnome
Ghostview), a Ghostscript front-end for the Gnome window manager.
It has been decommissioned and is no longer developed.
- Okular,
universal document viewer based developed by KDE. Okular works on multiple platforms, including but not
limited to Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD, etc.
- Ghostscript itself.
Besides viewing, Ghostscript can distill PostScript to PDF (and to
various image formats, bounding boxes, and many other things).
- For Windows: Sumatra PDF,
free software based on xpdf.
- There is also the proprietary (though zero-cost) Adobe (Acrobat)
Reader.
Excalibur, the LaTeX-aware spell checker for Mac.
OpenOffice math plugin
that allows writing LaTeX formulas in OpenOffice documents.
PerlTeX,
Perl programming plus TeX typesetting.
PerlTeX: Defining LaTeX
macros using Perl, an article by Scott Pakin, author of PerlTeX.
Programming with
PerlTeX, an article by Andrew Mertz and William Slough using
graduated examples.
ProofCheck, a system for writing
mathematical proofs in a directly (La)TeXable format.
PyTeX, Python programming plus TeX
typesetting.
stepTeX,
porting the famous NeXTStep TeX previewer
preview-latex,
WYSIWYGish in-line previews right in your Emacs source buffer
texd,
TeX as a daemon with a callable interface, written in Python.
TeXmacs, a WYSIWYG editor for
typing technical and mathematical text.
TeXamator,
free software in Python/Qt4 to create and manage exercise sheets,
packaged for several distros and translated to several languages.
TeXoMaker, free software
for teachers to create and manage exercise sheets in LaTeX.
MathType and the Equation Editor in MS Word. MathType is a WYSIWYG equation
editor that outputs TeX.
Label
& card printing resources with TeX and LaTeX, a discussion of
packages to print labels, envelopes, etc.
Multi-lingual typesetting in scripts and languages around the world:
- Ekushey
typing system—Bengali for Microsoft Word, a GPL-licensed
add-on for Word 97/2000/XP that enables Bengali typing. It has an
export to TeX option, meaning that it can be used either as a
conversion tool or as a WYSIWYG Bengali TeX editor.
- CSTeX, LaTeX and
plain TeX support for Czech and Slovak users, including special
fonts.
-
Japanese LaTeX (Platex) and related tools for pdf authoring
by Young Joon Moon, as part of a self-initiated project to guide
Japanese learners and Japanese to master kanji (Japanese/Chinese
characters) with minimal effort.
- Hóng-Zì,
a project to create Chinese Metafonts. Contributors encouraged.
- Using
GNU/Linux and LaTeX to create Japanese language documents.
- Japanese directory on CTAN.
- Online LaTeX previewer,
by Troy Henderson.
- TeX4ht, (La)TeX and more with
hypertext, originally written by Eitan Gurari. It supports LaTeX to
HTML and XML, including MathML, as well as OpenOffice and other formats.
- LaTeXML, converter from
LaTeX to XML, HTML, and EPUB (see also wikipedia page).
- LaTeX2HTML translator to
create Web pages from LaTeX documents. See also the
introductory
article.
- tex2page,
Scheme-based TeX-to-HTML conversion for TeX and LaTeX.
- HeVeA.
A LaTeX to HTML translater, written in objective Caml.
- tth, a
TeX to HTML converter.
- MediaWiki to
LaTeX, compiling MediaWiki pages to LaTeX and PDF (TUGboat article). Both an online converter and full downloadable
source are available.
- Wikipublisher supports
customized typesetting of web pages for print, using
LaTeX.
More web-related projects:
- neutriNote, a free Android app:
“In a nutshell, an all-in-one
preservation of written thoughts, be those text, math (LaTeX), rich
markdown, drawings, etc., in fully searchable plain text.”
- Authorea is an online collaboration
tool supporting LaTeX, Markdown, and most web formats, including
revision control.
- Mathapedia, authoring of
interactive math textbooks and graphics in real-time. Video
tutorial.
- HyperTeX,
original conventions for TeX hypertext.
Supporting (La)TeX equations within HTML, etc.:
MathJax,
JavaScript engine with output using CSS and web fonts or SVG.
mimetex.cgi,
equation typesetting for web pages via a cgi script.
GtkMathView for
TeX-quality formatting of MathML, by Luca Padovani.
Formula Freehand Entry System
(FFES), a pen-based equation editor.
InftyReader,
OCR for equations with LaTeX output.
mathurl, render LaTeX to an image and
generate a short url for use in email, IM, etc.
Yet more:
Markup Shredder, document
conversion from HTML to PDF using TeX.
ASTER
demo (spoken mathematics)
EquPlus: Science and Math Equations,
displaying code for science and math equations in TeX, MathML, and MathType,
including constants, symbols, and SI units.
Verbosus is an online LaTeX
editor (free to use), including PDF generation.
tbookdtd, XML
DTD for LaTeX documents, and HTML generation
Related software:
If you are interested in math and XML, look info
MathML,
the proposal for math on the Web, and a standard DTD.
BibTeX and bibliographies
- Basics: BibTeX home page and CTAN package page.
- BibTeX 101, an
introduction to BibTeX by Oren Patashnik (TUGboat 19:2).
- Massive
bibliography collection, from Nelson Beebe, including bibnet and the TUG bibliography
archive, both mirrored on tug.org.
- Tame the BeaST: The
B to X of BibTeX, a comprehensive BibTeX manual by Nicolas Markey.
- Bibfilex, a
cross-platform manager for BibLaTeX specifically.
- BibLaTeX: bibliographies
completely in LaTeX, using BibTeX or Biber for sorting.
- ebib, BibTeX
database manager for Emacs.
- JabRef, Java-based GUI for
managing BibTeX databases.
- Pybliographer, a
BibTeX tool which can be used for searching, editing, reformatting, etc.
It provides Python classes, has a graphical GNOME
interface, and references can be inserted directly into LyX (version
1.0.x running on the GNOME desktop.
- RefTeX,
for handling references with GNU Emacs.
Commercial and shareware TeX vendors and projects
- TeX
vendors list from the American Mathematical Society.
- Applied Symbols,
OpenType Computer Modern and Unimath, an OpenType math font.
- DiffDoc,
shareware for comparing html, pdf, and other documents.
- GrindEQ Math Utilities, for
importing/exporting (AMS)(La)TeX documents to/from Microsoft Word.
- LaTeXBase, online
collaborative writing and publishing.
- Overleaf for
collaborative writing and publishing.
- Scientific Word, a WYSIWYG
front end to LaTeX for Windows and Mac, is free to download and use.
- OzTeX for
the Macintosh, by Andrew Trevorrow, released as freeware.
- Personal TeX Inc. sells
and supports a complete TeX product for Windows.
- VTeX includes a
TeX IDE, visual tools, HTML, PDF, PS and SVG backends, and plenty more.
- WinEdt, a very powerful
TeX editor and shell for Windows.
- Y&Y was a TeX system for Windows; they're out
of business now, but their web pages and software are still available here.
See also the excellent pages on Journals Accepting
Manuscripts written using LaTeX by Gabriel Valiente.
A number of publishers provide ready-made style packages.
Scholarly and publishing organizations:
This file is public domain.
$Date: 2025/11/25 18:00:17 $;
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