This article was prepared by the Committee of the UK TeX Users
Group (UK TUG)
as a development of a regular posting to the Usenet newsgroup
comp.text.tex that was maintained for some time by
Bobby Bodenheimer ([email protected]).
Usenet is a mechanism for exchanging articles between people who share
interests or needs;
a newsgroup is an area within Usenet carrying a particular
class of articles. Since a common sort of article asks for help,
advice or information, and since certain of these questions are
regularly repeated (often with monotonous regularity), some
public-spirited souls took to writing articles which listed
``Frequently Asked Questions'' and answers to them. Many members
of UK TUG do not have access to Usenet, but could be expected to value
the answers about TeX that have accumulated over the years; so we
decided to update the list and publish it in Baskerville; we are
grateful to Bobby for his permission to use his article in this way.
As a quid pro quo, we are making the source of the article
freely available (usergrps/uktug/faq), and it can be compiled by
anyone who runs reasonably current
LaTeX2e,
and has the required fonts.
It was the committee's original intention that it would also be
possible for the content of this article to feed back to the world-wide TeX
community via regular posting to Usenet, but since Bobby was forced to
abandon his work in the area, no-one has been able to take his place.
An alternative hypertext version of this article may be found on the TeX Live CD-ROM.
When we started, we rearranged Bobby's original, and we have since added new questions and answers on the basis of our experience of answering questions about TeX, writing documents in TeX, and developing macros for TeX, over the years.
The committee is grateful for help and advice, from the following outside its number: Donald Arseneau, Barbara Beeton, Karl Berry, Damian Cugley, Michael Downes, John Hobby, Berthold Horn, Werner Icking, David Kastrup, Ted Nieland, Pat Rau, Piet van Oostrum, Oren Patashnik, Joachim Schrod, Philip Taylor, Ulrik Vieth, Rick Zaccone and Reinhard Zierke.
Further, Rosemary Bailey and Chris Rowley (who resigned from the committee in 1995), Alan Jeffrey and Carol Hewlett (who resigned from the committee in 1996), David Carlisle (who resigned from the committee in 1997), and Robin Fairbairns, Jonathan Fine and Sebastian Rahtz (who resigned from the committee in 1998) all made significant contributions to the conception, development and subsequent revision of this FAQ while they remained on the committee, and we are grateful to them for their contributions to it.