National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology
By: Niall McMahon,
School of Computing,
Dublin City University.
November 2002 (minor editing March 2006)
'256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar', Donald Knuth
I have just spent a few hours researching the typesetting system TeX and its implementation in a Windows environment. Being a complete TeX novice, I looked to the Internet for help and was not disappointed; there is a dizzying array of information on the subject!
The aim of this very short article is to present the results of my morning's researches.
According to Donald Knuth, the inventor of TeX, the system is "intended for the creation of beautiful books - and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics". Incidentally, the word TeX is pronounced 'Tech', the 'X' standing for the lower case Greek letter 'Chi'.
My initial problem was that I simply did not understand how TeX (and the various associated packages) worked. There seemed to be quite a few packages required to produce any kind of an output and even after some reading and downloading I was none the wiser. I had assumed that a TeX application would include everything required to produce a finished document in the same way that MS Word produces Word documents.
However after a little more reading and fiddling with downloaded software, the architecture of a TeX system finally made sense.
The original TeX system built by Donald Knuth turns marked up documents (TeX files) into a formatted DVI (Device Independent format) file for viewing or conversion to another format. This is analogous to the relationship between HTML documents and web browsers.
TeX itself can be quite a challenge to use, I believe, and is a relatively low-level language. It is, however, expandable and common TeX actions can be combined into macros. The most successful set of such macros is called LaTeX (pronounced Lay-Tech and was designed by Leslie Lamport (homepage,writings at Microsoft).
LaTeX seems to be the macro system of choice for TeX users.
So how do you use implement a TeX system running on MS Windows? Well first of all you need LaTex. There are many implementations of the LaTeX TeX macros. Most of these are for Unix/Linux based systems, but there are quite a few MS Windows based LaTeX binaries. This is unsurprising given that Knuth generously distributed TeX for nothing.
The best option by far, as far as I can see, is MIKTeX. The software is recommended by most LaTeX sites and version 2.5 is due in June 2006.
MIKTeX will take plain text files containing marked up information (again similar to HTML files) and transform the file into a DVI output. The input text files should be saved with a '.tex' extension.
MIKTeX is not pretty to deal with for those used to MS graphical interfaces. Communication is through the command prompt and it can take some time to get the hang of it. And at the end of the process you realise a DVI file that may not be so portable (though you can view it with YAP, the DVI viewer bundled with MIKTeX).
So to beautify and simplify the interaction with people, and to allow others to see the result of your work, in practice you will require at least two other pieces of software:
The first piece of software is a LaTeX shell that acts as a graphical front end for MIKTeX. This is basically a text editor that communicates with the MIKTeX program. It may also highlight TeX keywords and provide other useful functions. It removes the need to interface with MIKTeX through the command prompt.
At the time of going to press, I have downloaded and installed the free WinShell 2.2.1 as my MIKTeX front end. WinEdt may be a little better (gathered from the tiny amount I've read), but it comes at a cost. Both these software packages seem to be rated highly.
I'll go with WinShell for the moment.
The other piece of software you will need is a good document viewer. MIKTeX is bundled with a DVI to PostScript (ps) converter, but no ps viewer (the YAP viewer bundled with MIKTeX can only display DVI files). This is where you might need a ps/PDF viewer.
For this look to Ghostscript and GSView. The second program provides a front-end for Ghostscript in much the same way that Winshell is MIKTeX's front-end.
Winshell can be set-up to call GSView when displaying ps files (through Options | Program Calls).
It is also possible to configure Winshell to convert ps files to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). The MIKTeX package contains several PDF generators located at c:\texmf\miktex\bin\. However the easiest way to create PDFs is to install a copy of Adobe Acrobat.
And that's almost it; all that's left to do is to install MIKTeX, WinShell, and GSView/Ghostscript and then configure WinShell to use MIKTeX and GSView:
Start Winshell and proceed as follows:
And that is it.
And so to conclude: There is no such thing as a fully integrated graphical TeX system for MS Windows. Instead there is the text-based MIKTeX system that requires a shell system (such as WinShell) to interact graphically with the user, and one or more viewers to display the output.
I have yet to use the systems described, so my TeX adventure is just beginning.
What is TeX?Tex Users Group.
Micro introduction into LaTex, Math Department, Harvard.
Text Processing using LaTeX, Department of Engineering, Cambridge.
The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e: if you want to learn how to write your documents with LaTeX, this introduction is for you.
CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network is the authoritative collection of materials related to the TeX typesetting system.
LaTeX Math Symbols: useful collection of maths commands in LaTeX.
Introduction to the wonderful world of LaTeX
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© Niall McMahon, Modelling and Scientific Computing Group, School of Computing, Dublin City University, 2002 - 2006.
This research is supported by
National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology
