The Computer Science of TeX and LaTeX

The TeX typesetting system, and the macro package LaTeX written on top of it, are a popular word processor in mathematics, computer science, physics, and (!) philology. TeX was written by the Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth. This course will teach you the basics of LaTeX use, and TeX macro programming.

After that, we will go into various topics in computer science that relate to TeX. For instance, the line breaking and page breaking algorithms take us into optimization and graph theory, the TeX macro language lets us take a look at lambda calculus and functional programming, and the font description language Metafont leads to an exploration of splines and approximation theory. Finally, there are several software engineering aspects to TeX that we will look into, such as font encodings, the "torture test" approach to program correctness, and the Web system for "literate programming".

There is no book. All course materials will be in the form of handouts.

There will be regular homework.

The final may (I am not sure yet) take the form of projects to be done by one or two students each.

1. Introduction
2. Teaching TeX / LaTeX
3. Line and page breaking
4. Font and graphics stuff
5. Language aspects
6. Software engineering
7. Document markup

Last modified on 2004/04/08. Created by system with 2.1. #.