Making TeX Work

Chapter 4. Macro Packages

Everyone who uses TeX uses a macro package (also called a “format”). A macro package extends TeX to provide functionality that is suited to a particular task or set of tasks.

This chapter provides a summary of TeX macro packages. General-purpose packages designed to typeset a wide range of documents---articles, books, letters, and reports---are examined first. The general-purpose packages described are Plain TeX, Extended Plain TeX, LaTeX2e, LaTeX, AMSTeX, AMSLaTeX, Lollipop, and TeXinfo. After surveying the general-purpose packages, several special-purpose packages designed to handle specific tasks---typesetting transparencies, music, chemistry or physics diagrams, etc.---are described. The special-purpose packages surveyed are SliTeX, FoilTeX, Seminar, MusicTeX, ChemStruct, and ChemTeX.

There are a lot of overlapping features and similar commands in the general-purpose packages. To understand why this is the case, consider how a new macro package comes into existence. An ambitious person, who is very familiar with TeX, decides that there are some things she would like to express in her documents that are difficult to express with existing formats. Perhaps, for example, no existing format produces documents that match the precise specifications required for publishing in her field, or perhaps she has in mind a whole new document structuring paradigm. A more mundane possibility is simply that she has been customizing an existing format for some time and ...