LaTeX: A Document Processor

Unix was one of the first electronic typesetting platforms. The innovative AT&T troff system allowed researches at Bell Labs to generate high quality camera-ready proofs for their papers. Later, Donald Knuth invented a typesetting system called TE

X, which was far superior to other typesetting systems in the 1980s. However, it was still a typesetting language, where one had to specify exactly how text was to be set.

L^A

TE

X is a macro package for the TE

X system that allows an author to describe his document's function, thereby typesetting the text in an attractive and correct way. In addition, one can define semantic tags to a document, in order to describe the meaning of the document; rather than the layout.