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1  Introduction

Donald E. Knuth decided to create a new typesetting system, which would be called TEX, because there had been a change in the printing system used for the volumes of his book The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth found the result of the new system awful.

The goal of TEX was then to have a system which would always produce the same documents independently of the actual machine. Knuth also designed the Computer Modern family of typefaces and the METAFONT language for font description.

The work initiated in 1977 was finished (the languages were “frozen”) in 1989. TEX and METAFONT are not evolving any more except for minor bug fixes (TEX versions are numbered following the decimals of π – now 3.1415926 – and METAFONT the decimals of the number “e” – now 2.718281).

TEX provides basic tools (commands/instructions/“primitives”) to define typesetting; almost every detail has to be defined, but the language allows the creation of macros for repeatedly used constructs. So collections of macros are loaded through format files, these are pre-compiled large macro collections.

Knuth created an original default format (more or less 600 commands), it is called Plain TEX. This facilitates creating documents.

The most widely used format is LATEX (Leslie Lamport, 1985), which provides more global commands and structures for documents (article, book,…) allowing easier and faster work, but sometimes with loss of flexibility due to the more or less rigid framework. Other formats are -TEX, -LATEX, ConTeXt, having each specific goals and advantages (and drawbacks).

To extent the format, one loads “packages” which are collection of macros specific to some aspects of typesetting.

From its specification, late 60s, till now, last version March 2008, the TEX family had to evolve to take into account the developments in the typesetting world outside TEX.

Some of the problems to answer were/are 1) taking into account other languages with “alphabets” larger than the ASCII one or with non latin characters altogether, 2) having more fonts, there is not much variety in the fonts created with METAFONT (few font creator use it), 3) creating documents in other formats than the normal DVI (Device Indepent: format of files created by TEX), 4) using the rich possibilities of other typesetting systems and formats like PostScript and PDF, 5) having more calculation and scripting facilities,…

To answer these questions and others, many “engines” and programmes have been created around TEX, for example: pdftex, pdflatex, dvips, ps2pdf, METAPOST to open the TEX world to the possibilities of PostScript and PDF, XeTeX and XeLaTeX to be able to use the “normal” fonts found on the different machines and to be able to cope with writing systems different from the left to right systems which originated in Europe (latin and Cyrillic letters and associates) – right to left, vertically, pictograms,…, LuaTeX and LuaLaTeX to have a powerful scripting language.

But to use TEX and the systems of its family, one has to create a “source” document as TEX is only a system to create a typeset document from a source document. This source is a simple text with typesetting instructions and one needs a programme to create it: the editor.

There are many editors able to create a TEX source; some are general editors, others are specifically designed for TEX: here comes TEXworks.

TEXworks is a project to create a text editor for use with TEX family of tools; we will refer to these as (LA)TEX. Instead of creating a new sophisticated program, equipped with multiple tool-bars to meet any need, TEXworks provides a simple editor, offering at first sight only a limited set of tools for text editing as well as a single button and a menu to typeset a (LA)TEX text.

The idea to create the editor came to Jonathan Kew, the initiator and leader of the project, after a long period of reflection on the reasons why potential users tend to keep away from (LA)TEX, as well as from the success of the TEXshop editor on the Mac.

Finally the goal was also to provide the same editor on many operating systems: TEXworks currently runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The interface is always the same and the program offers the same functionality on all three platforms.

The first section of this manual explains how to install the software. In the second section, we describe the interface and create a first document showing the basics of TEXworks. In the third section the advanced tools provided by TEXworks are presented; you should read this section only after mastering the basic working of TEXworks. These advanced tools allow much more effective working practices. The last section, as annexes, provides lists of the keyboard short-cuts, the regular expression search/replace system, and the keywords for auto-completion. Finally, a short bibliography closes this manual.


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