Making TeX Work

Chapter 3. Running TeX

The heart of processing a document with TeX is running the TeX program. In this chapter, you'll learn what happens between the time you first start the TeX program and the time it finishes. You'll also learn what files TeX really needs (in addition to your document) and what to do when TeX finds things in your document that it doesn't understand.

What Do You Run?

The first thing you have to know is what program to run. Unfortunately, the actual file you have to execute varies between platforms and implementations. If you have built and/or installed TeX yourself, you probably already know what program to run. You'll have to ask your system administrator for help if you can't figure out what the name of the TeX executable is on your computer. The rest of this chapter assumes that the command tex runs TeX. You should substitute the name of the executable program on your own system for tex in the examples that follow.

Most implementations of TeX have some hard-coded memory limits. These limitations may cause problems if you are trying to run a very complex document through TeX. To combat this problem, some distributions include two versions of the TeX executable. One version is a “small” TeX that generally runs faster but has less memory available to process your documents. The other version, a “big” TeX, can process more complex documents but may run more slowly. If you get a “TeX capacity exceeded” error, and you have a big TeX available on your system, try ...