Running Linux, Third Edition

Text and Document Processing

In the first chapter, we briefly mentioned various text processing systems available for Linux and how they differ from word processing systems that you may be familiar with. While most word processors allow the user to enter text in a WYSISYG environment, text processing systems have the user enter source text using a text-formatting language, which can be modified with any text editor. (In fact, Emacs provides special modes for editing various types of text-formatting languages.) Then, the source is processed into a printable (or viewable) document using the text processor itself. Finally, you process the output and send it to a file or to a viewer application for display, or you hand it off to a printer daemon to queue for printing to a local or remote device.

In this section, we’ll talk first about three of the most popular text processing systems for Linux: TeX, groff, and Texinfo. At the end, we include a discussion about the available options if you would rather like to use a WYSIMWYG (what-you-see-is-maybe-what-you-get) word processor like those that predominate on Windows and Macintosh.

TeX and LaTeX

TeX is a professional text-processing system for all kinds of documents, articles, and books—especially those that contain a great deal of mathematics. It is a somewhat “low-level” text-processing language, because it TeX describes to the system how to lay out text on the page, how it should be spaced, and so on. TeX doesn’t concern itself directly ...