Chapter 13. Non-commercial Environments
This chapter offers an overview of several common free and shareware TeX systems. If you notice any conflicts between the information in this chapter and the documentation that comes with the software, please consider the documentation to be more accurate and up-to-date. I've attempted to provide hints and practical suggestions, but software installation is largely dependent on your system configuration and the way you want to use TeX.
Web2C
The official sources for all of the standard TeX programs are distributed in a format known as \web.[122] \web is an implementation of a programming style known as “literate programming.” One central tenet of literate programming is that source code and documentation should be written in parallel. Literate programming enforces this tenet by combining the two in a single file. \web source files contain a mixture of source code and documentation.
In \web files, the documentation is written in TeX, and the source code is written in Pascal. (Other literate programming environments use different documentation and programming languages.) To print the documentation, a special preprocessor called weave transforms the \web source into a TeX document that can be formatted and printed. Another preprocessor, called tangle, transforms the \web source into a Pascal program that can be compiled and executed.
In practice, it is far more likely that you have access to a C compiler than to a Pascal compiler. This is where ...
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