Using Plain TeX

Plain TeX is the basic dialect of the TeX typesetting tool. It is described in the book:

Knuth, Donald E. The TeXBook. Addison-Wesley, 1984, ISBN 0-201-13448-9.

This book describes:

• The TeX language itself.
• Plain TeX, a set of basic document composition functions for routine tasks.

Plain TeX does not have some advanced facilities, such as automatic generation of the table of contents and index. It is, however, much more flexible than LaTeX, and probably preferable if you want precise control over the formatting of your document.

See also:

• `Some useful TeX examples'
• `Using PostScript fonts in Plain TeX'
• Plain TeX: a crib sheet [PostScript file, 295kb, 9 pp.]
• A Gentle Introduction to TeX by Michael Doob. The Help Desk has a hardcopy of this document you can check out.

Last updated: 1997/07/18 21:48:52 UT
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/help/dtp/tex/plain.html