The Eplain Home Page

Eplain is a set of TeX macros that expands on and extends the definitions in plain TeX in a “style-neutral” fashion. See chapter 1 of the Eplain online manual for the rationale behind Eplain. Eplain was written by Karl Berry, Steven Smith and Oleg Katsitadze with contributions from many others. It is mostly in the public domain, with some contributions under the GNU GPL.

The current Eplain distribution is at version 3.4, Feb 21, 2010. Some older versions of Eplain are also available. Latest development sources for Eplain can be downloaded from the Eplain source repository.

The areas addressed by the Eplain macros include: commutative or arrow-theoretic diagrams; verbatim listings; table of contents; indexing; bibliographies with BibTeX; cross-references; double-, triple-, quadruple-columns; hypertext links (pdfTeX, dvipdfm and HyperTeX are supported); and loading (a few) LaTeX packages under plain TeX.

The distribution comes with extensive documentation, which may also be browsed online as a one-page document or split into small pages. If you prefer a hard copy and/or wish to support TUG, please consider purchasing a nicely printed version, all royalties for which go to TUG.

You might find this introductory article (written for TUGboat) useful, especially if you are new to Eplain. Also, Eplain contains a set of demo files which illustrate various aspects of Eplain (demo subdirectory in the distribution). The demos are thoroughly commented to help the beginners grasp the concepts easily. These demos, both the sources and the compiled PDF files, are also available online.

To use Eplain, simply put the command

    \input eplain

at the top of your TeX document. Eplain does not work with LaTeX, except for a few packages (including graphics, graphicx, color, url).

If you have questions or comments about Eplain, or wish to participate in or keep up with Eplain development, please feel free to join Eplain mailing list. Volunteers are always welcome.

These Eplain web pages and development are supported by the TeX Users Group. Please consider joining TUG, and thanks.

Current Eplain maintainer: Oleg Katsitadze.
$Date: 2010/02/23 04:53:03 $;