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This is the TeX showcase, edited by Gerben Wierda. It contains extreme examples of what you can do with TeX, the typesetting engine from Donald Knuth, world famous mathematician, computer scientist and above all well known for TeX. I will try to keep this showcase small. For remarks on submissions, see at the end of this document.
For an introduction to TeX, please visit the TUG "Getting Started" page, and especially the section on the first LaTeX document, and in this section the PDF file of example first document with embedded explanation. I want to add to this:
You can compare a Word Processor (e.g. MS Word) setup to a TeX setup as a Camper (or RV) versus having a house and a car. The Camper is for everything: you can live in it, you can drive with it and you can look at it. The Word Processor is like a Camper: it does editing, formatting/typesetting, and displaying. It is not excellent at any of these functions, but the combination is pretty neat. In a TeX setup, these functions are separated, like with having a house and a car. You have a separate editor of your own liking to edit, and you have TeX to do the actual typesetting/formatting. Especially when using macro packages like LaTeX or ConTeXt, you write conceptually and not visually and you leave the visual aspects to the TeX engine, which (generally) produces a PDF file. You need another program again (a PDF Viewer like Acrobat or Preview on the Mac) to read or print the result. Word Processors have improved on their typesetting algorithms, but they still do not reach the quality level of TeX just yet (I am writing this on Jan 2, 2014). TeX still produces the best looking typeset text and mathematical formulas on the planet. And writing conceptually instead of visually is really nice. You can concentrate on content and you do not have to worry about layout.
Some things are, however, difficult to do in TeX. Mostly these are the kind of things where you want very fine-grained control over exact positioning of images, wrapping around these images, etc. You can do this in TeX, but it is often (very) cumbersome to get it right and changes may be a lot of work. For this, people use (very expensive) Desktop Publishing (layout) setups, like Adobe InDesign (which generally also have better typesetting algorithms than Word Processors, (almost) matching the quality of TeX) in text (though not in mathematical formulas). TeX, on the other hand, is free. The showcase shows (amongst other things) the limits of what people have been able to do with TeX in the 'special effects' category. Some of these are really TeX-specific tricks (e.g this example (PDF), which only works because TeX is a programming language, zoom in as far as you can, don't try to do this in MS Word, InDesign etc.).
In this showcase, you will not only find examples of material prepared with TeX proper, but also with macro packages like LaTeX, ConTeXt and with related programs like METAPOST. And though TeX is a typesetting language, you will find graphics and even an MPEG movie.
Showcases are mostly PDF files. Some PDF files contain tricks that only work in certain PDF-viewers, e.g. they might contain automatic changes in the page that work in certain versions of Acrobat and only when certain preferences are set. The descriptions will contain special instructions if any.
Most examples come with some sort of source. These sources are not guaranteed to compile, they are only there for visual inspection. Some may compile, but some may have parts missing.
Some of these examples were prepared using proprietary fonts or software that must be purchased. For a discussion of font usage with TeX, including a sampler of available free fonts, please see this separate font page.
One word on the sections. These are generated automatically from a database and their titles speak for themselves. The exception is the section Yannis Haralambous. Yannis is famous in the world of TeX for his work on typesetting several languages (like Greek and Hebrew) with TeX. He donated a series of samples. The Hebrew and Syrian fonts are bitmaps, they might not look perfect in all circumstances.
_HEADER_EOF $footer = <<_FOOTER_EOF;This showcase does not have very fancy markup. It is created automatically by a perl script and a driver file and I am not an HTML-expert, that is why.
If you want to contribute something that is not already there, or which is better than what is already there, please send me a submission by e-mail. Do not send me URLs or anything that requires work for me to find it or download it, I must set a limit somewhere and I will generally not include items I have to go browsing for. Sorry.
Include the case and make sure it looks good on screen as well as in print (so no bitmap fonts), and if possible some source and a description. If you want, add a JPG or TIFF of 150x200 (width x length) pixels just like the icons above. Preferably, keep your names in sync: foo.pdf for the showcase entry with foo.jpg for the icon. Include source. It does not need to be complete in that it can be compiled and that all necessary support files are there, but it should illustrate how it was done in TeX (or MetaPost or whatever).
E-mail your submissions to tex-showcase at rna.nl.
Case (click for document) | Source | What it is |
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