n. An extremely powerful macro-based
text formatter written by Donald E. Knuth, very popular in the
computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced
UNIX 'troff(1)', the other favored formatter, even at many
UNIX installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural)
pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished
together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the
mixed-case 'TeX' is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only
devices). Fans like to proliferate names from the word 'TeX'
-- such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX
programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax,
and TeXnique.
Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental
'Art of Computer Programming' (see bible). In a
manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at
hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting
language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978;
he was wrong by only about 8 years. The language was finally
frozen around 1985, but volume IV of 'The Art of Computer
Programming' has yet to appear as of mid-1991. The impact and
influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody minds this
very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as a bit of
tool-building on the way to something else; Knuth's diversion was
simply on a grander scale than most.
