I’ve been learning a lot about the typesetting engine, TeX, lately. It’s really an amazing piece of software from the 1980s—not just because it still works 25 years later, but because of what it allows people to do. Perhaps with its powerful scripting capabilities it will be a long time yet before it becomes obsolete.

A few things I’ve learned:

1. “TeX” is an engine and command-line tool at the base of several tools.
2. There are modified TeX engines such as:
   • XeTeX — lets Mac OS users typeset using AAT or TTF fonts from the system
   • eTeX — an enhanced TeX engine
3. There are distributions of TeX, either built for you or packaged in some way:
   • AMS-TeX — used by mathematicians and scientists
   • teTex — the basic distribution most others are built from
   • TeXLive — a Mac OS distribution that puts all the engines and macro packages together.
4. And then there are macro packages which are like libraries of functions that enhance TeX (the macro packages generally work with any TeX distribution):
   • LaTeX — the oldest and largest macro package (advantages: well-documented and feature-rich; disadvantages: big, bloated, sometimes confusing)
   • conTeXt — a more recent macro package that binds things together at several different levels.

What I’ve been trying to do is build something like Jonathan Fine has at MathTran—a TeX daemon process that can render files (math equations in the case of MathTran) into PNG or JPG format at lightning speeds. I’d also like robust font support, such as is provided by XeTeX, but unfortunately it seems very slow. My testing showed that rendering a 100 page document using the standard TeX fonts with the standard TeX engine took about 1.5 seconds, while rendering the same document using a TrueType font and XeTeX took about 30 seconds. The bottom line is, that’s not fast enough for real-time document creation on the web.

An excellent “plain TeX” (i.e. TeX without any macro packages) introduction is available from professor Michael Doob at the University of Manitoba, A Gentle Introduction to TeX.

Since typesetting is the function of TeX, it stands to reason that the most complicated aspect of this engine is the way fonts are stored, used and rendered. I found a great summary at the University of Utah on font tools for TeX. Also, the TeX User Group website has some good information as well. And here are some free fonts I found. If you know of any other good font resources, I’d like to know. The fontinst utility also looks quite useful.

More soon.