![](https://seccdn.libravatar.org/avatar/dde14ae637ae8f7452e3a6cf286272fc.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Thursday 28 March 2002 10:39 am, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
TeX is basically a high powered macro processor. It comes with a plain set of macros that are fairly physical oriented. LaTeX is more logically oriented set of macros. Same core processor. For document classes LaTeX supports, it is much easier to use. For things it doesn't, like resumes, TeX is easier to use. Having used TeX/LaTeX for over a decade, I find the integration in Linux very nice (font bitmaps are generated automagically, where to put local extensions fairly obvious, support in Emacs, etc.).
I used TeX for my book "Unix for the Impatient", with lots of custom macros and some very obscure hacking. It provides superb control over typographical elements that are almost impossible to get any other way, and the book was almost 700 pages long. But the trouble with TeX, even if you're a near-wizard at it, is that sometimes you just can't figure out how to get from here to there. Much of that is the result of its original very limited memory model. For instance, TeX does a beautiful job of breaking paragraphs into lines but is very weak on breaking galleys into pages. That's almost entirely because the machines on which it was originally run didn't have enough memory for page-breaking; the algorithms and methods TeX uses for line breaking would extend nicely to page breaking. Its "keep together" macros often have unpleasant side effects on the surrounding pages. There are many other peculiarities one needs to deal with that are like that. I'm planning to use TeX for my next book (on LInux, of course), but for anyone else the upfront investment of learning to use it effectively is very large. I believe that there are new versions of TeX (with slightly different names -- Donald Knuth is adamant that TeX must never change) that help with some of TeX's oddities, but I haven't yet checked them out. LaTeX is great if it does things the way you want it to and awful if it doesn't. That was pretty much Leslie Lamport's philosophy in creating it. There's a certain amount of room for modification of style, but once you get beyond Lamport's carefully crafted boundaries, you need to become an expert both in the LaTeX macro definitions and TeX itself. I remember once encountering a weird problem with horizontal rules in tables, where LaTeX just refused to do what obviously needed to be done. I guess with all of these things, an essential question is how much effort you're willing to invest in your tools. It sometimes feels like opening an auto repair shop. For casual use of a document generator, almost anything will work. But when you really have a high stake in the typographical quality of the result, an investment of lots of time in your tools may be unavoidable. Paul Abrahams