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- Because LaTeX files are not the document itself but rather instructions on what each part of the document should be, you don’t normally give other people your LaTeX file itself. Instead, after writing your LaTeX source, you run LaTeX on the file (normally using a program called pdflatex) to create a PDF file.
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What is the difference between latex and pdflatex?
Is pdflatex the same as plain TeX?
What is the difference between Tex and pdfTeX?
What is the difference between XeTeX & latex?
7 Answers. Sorted by: 109. Some packages only work with direct PDF output, since they utilise features not available in PostScript, as mentioned by Dima. Another difference stems from the fact that tex and pdftex are simply different programs, implemented independently.
Jan 13, 2012 · Note that the \documentclass instruction is itself a "LaTeX"-specific macro, i.e., it is not recognized by "Plain TeX". Therefore, pdftex (which loads the "plain TeX" format) cannot proceed properly once it encounters the \documentclass instruction on line 1 of the input file.
- The Original Tex
- Latex
- Pdftex
- Xelatex and Luatex
- Context
- The Future
There are a large family of tools which are now derived from TeX, and it canlook like a list of nonsense words on first sight: LaTeX, pdfTeX, XeLaTeX,LuaTeX, ConTeXt, and so on. The ancestor of all of these is of course theoriginal TeX program by Knuth. This takes a document in plain text andtransforms it into a beautifully typeset document. Knuth ...
The commands in TeX and Plain TeX are still quite basic and it isn't easy to docomplicated things with them. To help with this, Leslie Lamport createdLaTeX in the early 1980s to provide a higherlevel language to work in than TeX. LaTeX is a set of commands defined in termsof the underlying TeX commands, often at many many layers of abstraction. All...
The TeX program is remarkably stable for a piece of software over 20 years old;Knuth declared that it was feature complete in 1989, and only bug fixes havebeen made since. Of course, this has not stopped the significant and ongoingdevelopment of LaTeX, because that is written in TeX itself. In fact, thestability of TeX has allowed packages like LaT...
So far we have seen that TeX has evolved in two different ways since itsbeginning: With the addition of easier to use commands on top of the originalsystem (LaTeX), and with updates to the underlying program to support PDF output(pdfTeX). The story does not stop there however and there have been continuingefforts to modernize TeX. In 2004 Jonathon ...
We've mentioned LaTeX as an extension to the commands available in TeX, but it'snot the only package that has extended TeX in a significant way.ConTeXt is another system whichwas created in 1990 by Hans Hagen. LaTeX aims to separate the user from havingto make decisions about typography and layout (you type \section and \emphbut you don't worry abo...
What will the future hold for TeX and LaTeX? I don't know yet, but as Alan Kay oncesaid: With ShareLaTeX we hope to improve TeX and LaTeX in a third direction, by bringing significant improvements to the LaTeXworkflow. Despite being over 20 years old, LaTeX is still largely a command lineprogram that must be used in an awkward cycle of writing, com...
One of the main differences from an operational point of view is that XeTeX has better support for fonts -- in particular you can use system fonts instead of only TeX fonts. It also has better support for non-latin character encodings.
Basically, tex consumes plain Τεχ files, not LaΤεχ ones. And it generates DVI files, not PDFs. pdftex consumes Τεχ but generates PDFs. latex consumes LaΤεχ, but generates DVIs. I do not know what do you mean by ‘all the others’.
First things first, the difference between pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX is the same as the difference between TeX and LaTeX described above, it is the same binary with a different format file. The difference between TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, luaTeX is that they are different versions of the fundamental TeX executable.
Understanding that TeX engines are programmable is the key to truly appreciating the differences between LaTeX, pdfTeX, pdfLaTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and so forth. Each TeX engine (program) understands hundreds of so-called primitive commands.
