Global InformationLaTeX information
 The LaTeX Project logo | |
| Original author(s) | Leslie Lamport |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1984 |
| Stable release | November 2023 LaTeX release[1] 
/ 1 November 2023 |
| Repository |
|
| Type | Typesetting |
| License | LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) |
| Website | latex-project |
LaTeX (/ˈlɑːtɛk/ LAH-tek or /ˈleɪtɛk/ LAY-tek,[2][Note 1] often stylized as LaTeX) is a software system for typesetting documents.[3] LaTeX markup describes the content and layout of the document, as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document (such as bold and italics), and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file (such as PDF or DVI) suitable for printing or digital distribution.
LaTeX is widely used in academia for the communication and publication of scientific documents and technical note-taking in many fields.[4][5] It also has a prominent role in the preparation and publication of books and articles that contain complex multilingual materials, such as Arabic and Greek.[6] LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language.
LaTeX can be used as a standalone document preparation system, or as an intermediate format. In the latter role, for example, it is sometimes used as part of a pipeline for translating DocBook and other XML-based formats for PDF. The typesetting system offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing of tables and figures, chapter and section headings, graphics, page layout, indexing and bibliographies.
Like TeX, LaTeX started as a writing tool for mathematicians and computer scientists, but even from early in its development, it has also been taken up by scholars who needed to write documents that include complex math expressions or non-Latin scripts,[7] such as Arabic, Devanagari and Chinese.[8]
LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level, descriptive markup language that accesses the power of TeX in an easier way for writers. In essence, TeX handles the layout side, while LaTeX handles the content side for document processing. LaTeX comprises a collection of TeX macros and a program to process LaTeX documents, and because the plain TeX formatting commands are elementary, it provides authors with ready-made commands for formatting and layout requirements such as chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and bibliographies.
LaTeX was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport at SRI International.[9] The current version is LaTeX2e (stylised as LaTeX2ε), first released in 1994 but incrementally updated starting in 2015. This update policy replaced earlier plans for a separate release of LaTeX3 (LaTeX3), which had been in development since 1989.[10] LaTeX is free software and is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL).[11]
- ^ "LaTeX2e Release Newsletters". Retrieved 4 December 2023.
- ^ "An introduction to LaTeX". LaTeX project. Retrieved 18 April 2016.
- ^ Lamport, Leslie (1986). LATEX: a document preparation system. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. ISBN 0-201-15790-X. OCLC 12550262.
- ^ "What are TeX, LaTeX and friends?".
- ^ Alexia Gaudeul (June 2007). "Do Open Source Developers Respond to Competition?: The (La)TeX Case Study". Review of Network Economics. 6 (2). doi:10.2202/1446-9022.1119. S2CID 201097782.
- ^ Markin, Pablo (1 November 2017). "LaTeX, Open Source Software, Facilitates the Adoption of Open Access by Authors, Repositories and Journals". OpenScience. Retrieved 5 November 2017.
- ^ "Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec". Retrieved 2022-04-09.
- ^ "Chinese". www.overleaf.com. Retrieved 2020-12-30.
- ^ Leslie Lamport (April 23, 2007). "The Writings of Leslie Lamport: LaTeX: A Document Preparation System". Leslie Lamport's Home Page. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
- ^ "Quo vadis LaTeX(3) Team — A look back and at the upcoming years" (PDF). www.latex-project.org. Retrieved 2023-06-09.
- ^ "LaTeX - A document preparation system". www.latex-project.org. Retrieved 2019-07-20.
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