8

I was wondering what relations and differences are between "Macro packages", "TeX engines" and "Distributions" of TeX?

I saw these concepts when looking at the following table at the end of this wikipedia page: enter image description here

I am not able to find their meanings, and wonder what they mean?

7
  • 5
    Possible duplicates (when combined): TeX Distribution and Engine and The differences between TeX engines. Macro packages are just a collection of macros, packages up into a bundle.
    – Werner
    Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 4:48
  • @Werner: Thanks! (1) What do you mean by “packages up into a bundle“? (2) Is LaTex a (Marco) package of Tex?
    – Tim
    Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 4:50
  • (1) Should have read "Packaged into a bundle". (2) Plain TeX itself contains macros, and could be considered the first level above the TeX engine. LaTeX is built on top of plain TeX. That is, LaTeX is a bunch of macros built as an additional interface between the user and plain TeX (see latex.ltx).
    – Werner
    Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 5:16
  • @werner -- latex doesn't provide an interface to plain tex, and indeed, some of the things it does are explicitly not according to plain's view of the world. Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 9:04
  • @wasteofspace: depends on what you mean by "plain tex": if you mean "plain tex – the macro language", then yes, LaTeX does provide an interface. If you mean "plain tex – the format", then… well, LaTeX does use plain as a base for many things.
    – morbusg
    Commented Jul 10, 2012 at 11:14

1 Answer 1

5

The list is slightly muddled, through category errors; the criterion for inclusion is obviously "there's a wikpedia page on this one".

However, https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texthings covers a bunch of them (mostly engines and format macro packages), and other early answers in http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html cover a lot of the rest.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .