8

I was wondering what relations and differences are between "Macro packages", "TeX engines" and "Distributions" of TeX？

I saw these concepts when looking at the following table at the end of this wikipedia page: enter image description here

I am not able to find their meanings, and wonder what they mean?

egreg
  • 1,121,712
Tim
  • 5,763
  • 5
    Possible duplicates (when combined): TeX Distribution and Engine and The differences between TeX engines. Macro packages are just a collection of macros, packages up into a bundle. – Werner Jul 10 '12 at 04:48
  • @Werner: Thanks! (1) What do you mean by “packages up into a bundle“？ (2) Is LaTex a (Marco) package of Tex? – Tim Jul 10 '12 at 04:50
  • (1) Should have read "Packaged into a bundle". (2) Plain TeX itself contains macros, and could be considered the first level above the TeX engine. LaTeX is built on top of plain TeX. That is, LaTeX is a bunch of macros built as an additional interface between the user and plain TeX (see latex.ltx). – Werner Jul 10 '12 at 05:16
  • @werner -- latex doesn't provide an interface to plain tex, and indeed, some of the things it does are explicitly not according to plain's view of the world. – wasteofspace Jul 10 '12 at 09:04
  • @wasteofspace: depends on what you mean by "plain tex": if you mean "plain tex – the macro language", then yes, LaTeX does provide an interface. If you mean "plain tex – the format", then… well, LaTeX does use plain as a base for many things. – morbusg Jul 10 '12 at 11:14
  • See http://www.tug.org/levels.html – Martin Schröder Jul 11 '12 at 11:08
  • See http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/58431/glossary-of-tex-and-latex-terms/58449#58449 for some definitions – Caramdir Jul 19 '12 at 15:47

1 Answers1

5

The list is slightly muddled, through category errors; the criterion for inclusion is obviously "there's a wikpedia page on this one".

However, https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texthings covers a bunch of them (mostly engines and format macro packages), and other early answers in http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html cover a lot of the rest.

David Carlisle
  • 757,742
wasteofspace
  • 5,352