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When I first started using TeX, I felt overwhelmed by the myriad of names — BibTeX, XeTeX, LaTeX, XeLaTeX, ConTeXt, LuaTeX, MacTeX, TeXLive — and more. I didn't know the packages from the programs from the distributions, or what begat what.

Since then I've learned, but once in a while I still come across names I don't recognize. I often wonder where I might find a “TeX Family Tree” showing how everything relates along a timeline. I've looked and looked, but have never found anything. So, I decided to bite the bullet and roll my own.

I'm looking for feedback:

  • Are the relationships correct?
  • Is anything major missing?
  • What can be improved?

Clicking on the image leads to a PDF. I made two versions: Portrait and Landscape.

The chart spans 52 years — all the way back to 1962, when D.E.K. began writing TAOCP — and includes 17 versions of TeX, 12 versions of METAFONT, 17 derivatives of TeX (CommonTeX, Web2C, MLTeX, eTeX, TeX-XeT, TeX--XeT, eTeX, eLaTeX, encTeX, Omega, Aleph, XeTeX, XeLaTeX, ArabXeTeX, ConTeXt, LuaTeX, LuaLaTeX), 3 formats (Plain TeX, AMS-TeX, LaTeX), 7 tools (WEB, CWEB, dvips, pdftex, pdfetex, pdflatex, BibTeX), 8 distributions (PCTeX, DirectTeX, MiKTeX, proTeXit, teTeX, 4AllTeX, TeXLive, MacTeX), and 36 D.E.K. publications (TAOCP, Computers & Typesetting, Literate Programming, and so on). I learned a lot making this.

I included Knuth's writings because (a) I think they're integral to TeX's history and because (b) I find it fascinating how they fit into the overall timeline, epecially the gaps.

If anyone would like to experiment with modifications, please be my guest. The graphviz source is here.

Todd Lehman
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    Wow, impressive. Shouldn't there be some connection between LaTeX and the version of TeX it is based on? Also, this seems like a community wiki question to me. – Canageek Jan 28 '12 at 16:49
  • First of all it was very difficult to follow the tree ;-). Nevertheless I think great work. You listed bibtex ==> biblatex but biber is missing. I think this sould be mentioned. – Marco Daniel Jan 28 '12 at 18:10
  • You might want to look at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/38895/list-of-tex-formats : I don't know if there is anything there you have missed, but it sure has a lot of alternate macro packages on it. – Canageek Jan 28 '12 at 19:09
  • It is nice, but I think the TAOCP timeline is too much. If you really want to include it I think the scale of the timeline should not be uniform. – dfc Jan 29 '12 at 04:11
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    I hope you don't mind, but I made the images smaller because 6600px wide image was really too much for browsers. – morbusg Jan 29 '12 at 12:09
  • @morbusg: no, I don't mind at all. In fact, thank you! – Todd Lehman Jan 29 '12 at 14:08
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    small addition: 1978, knuth's first published documentation of tex: "Tau Epsilon Chi: a system for technical text"; first appeared as a stanford computer science report, then published by ams as a pocket-sized yellow book with a large green TeX on the cover with a background "TeXture" of smaller tex logos in green. – barbara beeton Jan 30 '12 at 20:11
  • @barbarabeeton: Do you know if the 1978 document is archived anywhere online for reading? I would love to read it. I just bought a used copy of "TEX and METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting" on Amazon a couple days ago—a book I haven't seen since my father brought a copy home one day, 33 or so years ago. It had a profound influence on my interest in graphics and typesetting back then. – Todd Lehman Jan 31 '12 at 13:31
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    many tex-related reports are listed among the [stanford comp sci dept tech reports]{http://infolab.stanford.edu/TR/) for the 1970s and 1980s, but not that one. (the reference number is STAN-CS-78-675.) a google search for -- "tau expilon chi" knuth -- turns up quite a few references, but as far as i can tell there's no readable copy on line, almost certainly because of copyright restrictions. i will investigate the possibility of releasing the copyright so that the original stanford cs report can be posted. – barbara beeton Jan 31 '12 at 13:59
  • @barbarabeeton: Thank you for the reference number. I see that the Sep '78 version is 200 pages, whereas the '79 version is only 105 pages, with both being 21 cm. That is very interesting! Based on its title, I had assumed it was a survey of perhaps only 10–15 pages. Makes me all the more curious now. :-) – Todd Lehman Jan 31 '12 at 15:58
  • Some important milestones for Knuth's writings might include the following: The 2nd edition of Volume 1, published in 1973, was the last one published with traditional Monotype typesetting technology. Then came the 2nd edition of Volume 2, originally planned for 1977 but eventually published in 1981, which was the first one produced with TeX78. Finally the new edition of volumes 1-3, published as a boxed set in 1997, finally produced with TeX82 and MF84. – Ulrik Vieth Mar 09 '12 at 13:09
  • Regarding the history of the teTeX distribution: teTeX-0.2 came in late 1994, originally on 5 floppy disks. Several versions of teTeX-0.3.x came in 1995 and teTeX-0.4 in 1996. The TeX historic archive contains a collection of various teTeX versions. – Ulrik Vieth Mar 09 '12 at 13:14
  • More nitpicking on early history: TeX78 was still SAIL not Pascal, TeX80 was probably the first one in SAIL. Before TeX82, plain.tex was originally called basic.tex. Details can be found on the SAILdart archive – Ulrik Vieth Mar 09 '12 at 13:24
  • Both of the links to the images seem to be broken..? – malin Jun 24 '13 at 14:52
  • @malin — thanks...oops... contents moved. Links now fixed. – Todd Lehman Jun 24 '13 at 17:40
  • Nice. Is making your source code available an option if this is done in TeX? – McGafter Feb 27 '14 at 15:39
  • @McGafter — I actually made it using the digraph style of dot. If you have Graphviz installed, I can put up the .gv file on Pastebin or something, if you want. – Todd Lehman Feb 27 '14 at 23:56
  • I was actually looking for drawing these kinds of graphics in TeX. So don't bother then. Thanks anyway. (I just think that you need to put some of the high-scoring people on TeX.SX on that diagram as well. They are almost a TeX distribution themselves...) – McGafter Feb 28 '14 at 09:06
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    The link to source is not available anymore: http://jadzia.bu.edu/~tsl/TeX-Family-Tree-Timeline/tree.gv. Please can you update it? – algorytmus Jun 06 '16 at 20:05
  • @algorytmus — Ah yes; thank you. Fixed now. – Todd Lehman Jun 06 '16 at 22:00
  • This is great, thank you! I would like to see a more comprehensive TeX-related publication history, e.g. it appears that even before the December 1979 Knuth's "TeX & METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting" its three parts had appeared independently, he had given the "Mathematical Typography" talk in January 1978, and of course he was working on TeX even before then… and software like eqn also would be nice to mention. But then again, this image may not be the right place to cover all that. Anyway, thanks! – ShreevatsaR Sep 10 '16 at 06:11
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    Thank you Todd, with the help of your code I discovered dot/graphviz and I created a timeline of tabletop role-playing games. I took the liberty to cite you on the partial release of the source code https://github.com/pmartinolli/OtSoD-TTRPG-timeline Because the source code is so simple and the softwares are opensource, building timelines like this can easily become learning activities for graduate students. – Pascaliensis Jun 06 '19 at 17:37
  • @Pascaliensis — Glad to have been a help! – Todd Lehman Jun 06 '19 at 22:42

3 Answers3

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I think you need a key, it wasn't always clear what the colours stand for, for example e-LaTeX/pdfe-LaTeX, Aleph appear to be marked as implementations like pdfTeX/Omega, but they are (more or less) just formats built over the relevant engines. Similarly I'd have expected to see context colored as a format like latex rather than an implementation (although it's always come with additional programs and scripts in addition to the TEXformat at its heart).

The most influential format precursor of LaTeX2e is omitted, namely the NFSS-LaTeX formats distributed in parallel to LaTeX2.09 in its later years.

Several influential implementations are omitted, early implementations on PC included ArborTeX and SBTeX (and most influential around the time of the LaTeX2e design, emTeX) The commercial Y&Y TeX and VTeX formats were notable for early support of scalable font formats.

Notable implementations on mac should include TeXtures, I think it was the only Mac implementation for a long time. The implementation timeline ought to start from the beginning, not from PCTeX, VMSTeX various mainframe TeXs, etc.

Sorry no dates in this comment, just some initial observations..

Joseph Wright
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David Carlisle
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Arno Trautmann has produced a nice document on the same topic, title "An overview of TeX, its children and their friends..." (available from ctan and github).

On most TeX distribution, it can be viewed directly by typing

texdoc tex-overview.pdf

in a terminal.

Xavier
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sukii
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    +1 It would add value if you can eloborate with a simple oneline about the title of document and permanent link like this one http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/tex-overview/tex-overview.pdf or texdoc tex-overview.pdf at the commandline terminal. Otherwise links may vanish overtime – texenthusiast Jan 08 '13 at 05:49
  • @texenthusiast: Below? In my setup there is nothing below , eehm, now mine comment. ;-) In other words: It would have been better to write something like “in a comment to his own answer” – you could even link it: “comment to his own answer”. – Speravir Jan 08 '13 at 16:38
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Kudos: this is great to see. I particularly enjoyed seeing the laying out of Knuth's work in a timeline. Did he really throw away his Tex and Metafont implementations in SAIL a year after writing them? Yes, I see he did.

There was a whole host of rival formats in the mid 80s to early 90s of which Latex became the winner. These might take up too much space to document in any detail. David notes that the NFSS is not put in the timeline, which is of obvious importance to the development of Latex. Some other of the most important format-independent macro packages might also be worth including.

Context also deserves a tree. There's not a good history of it that I know of, but Hans Hagen documents that it is based on INRS Tex in his TUG Boat interview. I understand that early Context incorporated a lot of macros from TABLE, a big table-setting macro package from the 80s, and I think it might also have incorporated the macros from Pictex.

Charles Stewart
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  • I had a really hard time finding old information about ConTeXt. I didn't put this on the chart but I think it was originally called pragmatex prior to its public release in 1996. (This is accidentally showing up in the chart as ConTeXt0.) – Todd Lehman Jan 30 '12 at 16:58
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    @Todd: Ah, I hadn't spotted that Context was nestling among the implementations - that's not really right, because Context mk. II is a regular Tex format that runs on Xetex and Pdftex, and Context mk. IV is a mixture of Tex and Lua scripts that runs on Luatex. I'd group it in yellow with Plain Tex and Latex. Have you looked at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/tex-overview/tex-overview.pdf? – Charles Stewart Jan 31 '12 at 14:13
  • Likewise, I think you can drop some nodes: lualatex, pdflatex, and xelatex are just slightly tweaked formats of Latex for the respective engines. – Charles Stewart Jan 31 '12 at 14:19
  • Ooh—how did you find that? That's way more complete than what I came up with. Nice. I wish I had been able to find this; this is very close what I've been seeking for a long time. Doesn't have years/dates, but has quite a bit of family-tree style information. Thank you! (p.s. I'll fix the ConTeXt thing.) – Todd Lehman Jan 31 '12 at 15:43
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    @Todd: I searched CTAN for mentions of pragmatex. You have quite a few things in your chart not in those charts. I guess I should put that document in my answer. – Charles Stewart Feb 01 '12 at 09:40
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    Taco has been maintaining an archive of ConText releases at Suppelec – Ulrik Vieth Mar 09 '12 at 13:26
  • @UlrikVieth - Thanks, that is useful. The URL has changed to foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev – Charles Stewart Jun 28 '14 at 17:55