[ Thanks to Roland
for this link. ]
“Fans of OpenOffice, Abiword, and KOffice, and Scribus
dominate the open source document printing discussion, because
traditional office suites and desktop publishing apps account for
the lion’s share of the pages in our paper trays. But for a lot of
old-school typesetters and writers, nothing in the WYSIWYG realm
can hold a candle to the performance and flexibility of TeX, and
its popular LaTeX and BibTeX derivatives. Although TeX is most
often used to create structured documents like research papers, it
can be used to generate any document type — including
specialty items. For the unfamiliar, here are some resources for
using TeX to print envelopes, labels, badges, and cards.“A bit of background
“TeX, for those who have not used it, is a text-markup language.
The markup syntax is different, but much like HTML, it uses special
tags to designate emphasis, boldface, spacing adjustments, bulleted
lists, footnotes, and all other sorts of typographic elements. But
TeX is designed for printing, not on-screen display. It was created
by computer science guru Donald Knuth to help him typeset The Art
of Computer Programming, and it handles complex print-centric tasks
like hyphenation, justification, and footnotes/end-notes with ease.
It also has robust support for typesetting mathematical
expressions, which makes it the de-facto choice of a variety of
scientific journals.”