pdfTeX is another extension of TeX that incorporates the e-TeX extensions and skips the intermediate DVI format to directly produce PDF documents.Since 2017 LaTeX2e officially requires the additional e-TeX primitives. e-TeX is an extension of TeX that adds additional primitives to make the live of a TeX programmer easier.It produces DVI images and is limited to 8-bit inputs, allowing 256 different characters in the text input. TeX is not only the name of the language itself but also the name of the original engine written by Donald Knuth.We will now look at the main engines available for LaTeX. The device independent file format (DVI) is an intermediary format that is usually again translated to PostScript or PDF. It does all the typesetting tasks like hyphenation, layout of mathematical formulas and so on. Now we have to think about which engine we want to use to create our documents.Ī LaTeX engine is a piece of software that takes your LaTeX document as input and produces an output that is usually either a DVI or a PDF document. OK, so now we have a LaTeX document and we know what version of the LaTeX macro package we are using. Typesetting engines that translate LaTeX documents The TeX standard defines the basic concepts such as the facts that things that start with a \ are treated as command sequence or that curly braces or \RequirePackage respectively. In short, TeX is the actual language that we write our documents in. The first thing that may cause confusion is the distinction between TeX and LaTeX. Here I will try to untangle all the different technicalities and confusions surrounding the ambiguous term “LaTeX version”. If all those options don’t make any sense to you and you don’t feel much wiser after googling “Which LaTeX version should I use?”, or if exactly this search has brought you here, then this post is for you. Have you recently (or not so recently) started using LaTeX and wondered, whether you should be using MikTeX, Live TeX, LaTeX2e, pdfLaTeX, LaTeX3, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX (or maybe it’s LuaTeX), or something else?
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