O’Reilly Network: Living Linux: Processing TeX and LaTeX Files

“Donald Knuth, the world’s foremost authority on algorithms,
wrote TeX in 1984 as a way to typeset his books, because he wasn’t
satisfied with the quality of available systems. Since then, many
extensions to the TeX formatting language have been made — the
most notable being Leslie Lamport’s LaTeX, which is designed to
facilitate the typesetting of structured documents. (LaTeX probably
gets more day-to-day use than the plain TeX format, but in my
experience, both systems are useful for different kinds of
documents.)”

“While not everyone wants needs to write documents with TeX
or LaTeX, these formats are widely used, especially on Linux
systems. So every Linux user has the potential to encounter one of
these files. This column tells you how to deal with
them….”

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