Making TeX Work

Chapter 2. Editing

This chapter describes several writing environments available for creating and modifying TeX documents. In practice, you can use almost any editing program you wish, but I'll focus on GNU emacs in this chapter. I've chosen GNU emacs for two reasons: it is a popular and very powerful editor available on many platforms (unix, NeXT, MS-DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, VMS, Amiga, $...$), and it has the most comprehensive TeX editing environment that I've ever seen. At the end of the chapter, I'll discuss several other editors for MS-DOS and OS/2 that also have TeX editing environments.

The sole requirement for a TeX editor is that it must save files in a flat, ASCII format without any additional formatting characters or special encodings. Word processors, such as Microsoft Word, usually add special formatting information to your document when they save it to disk. TeX will not understand this information, so you cannot use a word processor to edit TeX documents.^[17]

A program that allows you to edit flat ASCII files is usually called an editor (as opposed to a word processor, for example). Choosing an editor is a remarkably personal decision. Computer programmers and other people who use editors every day frequently become very attached to a particular editor. This chapter explores a number of features that an editor can provide to make editing TeX documents easier. If possible, choose an editor that offers these features. In any event, make sure you choose an editor you will ...