teTeX is Thomas Esser's implementation of TeX for Linux systems. This means getting the executable programs themselves to run under Linux and providing fonts in form usable by Linux users. The rest of the code, the TeX and LaTeX itself, is portable across various machines.
In addition to the executable programs themselves, the distribution includes all of the TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont sources, BibTeX, MakeIndex, and ALL of the documentation... about 3 megabyte's worth. In short, it's a reasonably complete implementation of TeX 3.1419 and LaTeX 2e, and the documentation covers everthing you will forseeably know to get started. So, install it. Not only will you eventually read all of it, the documentation also provides useful examples of "live" TeX and LaTeX code.
In comparison with other implementations of TeX, installation of teTeX is almost trivial even without the slackware setup program, not counting the effort necessary to insert and remove the nine diskettes of the slackware distribution. If you installed the slackware-distributed teTeX, you can pretty much skip the first part of this document. The next few sections are for the rest of you...
TeX is a typesetting system developed by Professor Donald Knuth. It is a lower-level typesetting language that powers all of the higher-level packages, like LaTeX. Essentially, LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that provide convenient, predefined document formats for end users. If you like the formats provided by LaTeX, you may never need to learn bare-bones TeX programming. The difference between the two languages is like the difference between assembly language and C. You can have the speed and flexibility of TeX, or the convenience of LaTeX. Which brings us to the next answer,
ANSWER NO. 2: YOU HAVE IT BACKWARDS!!! I WANT TO KNOW WHAT EXACTLY I NEED TO GET BEFORE I CAN HAVE TeX ON MY SYSTEM!
It's important to remember that TeX only handles the typesetting part of the document preparation. Generating output with TeX is like compiling source code into an executable program. You prepare an input file with a text editor -- what most people think of as "word processing" -- typeset the input file document with TeX to produce a device-independent output file, called a ".dvi" file. You will also need output output drivers for your printer and video display. These output drivers are collectively known as "dviware."
Any of the editors that come with Linux -- jed, joe, jove, vi, vim, stevie, GNU emacs, microemacs -- will work to prepare a TeX input file, as long as the editor reads and writes plain-vanilla ascii text. My preference is GNU emacs. There are several reasons for this:
1. Emacs's TeX and LaTeX modes obviate the need for a stand-alone TeX shell. 2. Emacs can automatically insert TeX-style, ``curly quotes,'' as you type, rather than the "ascii-vanilla" kind. 3. Emacs has integrated support for texinfo and makeinfo (more on this later). 4. Emacs is widely supported and does everything except butter the toast in the morning. 5. Emacs is free.
It's important (and probably overdue) to emphasize the difference between the TeX typesetting software and the .dvi imaging systems that are used for output, whether on-screen or on paper. TeX itself operates independent of both the fonts that you need to install for a particular output device, like a printer or plotter, and the output driver itself. In fact, much of TeX, and therefore LaTeX's complexity, arises from its implementation of various font systems, and the way these fonts are specified. A major improvement of LaTeX 2e over its predecessor was the way users specify fonts, the former New Font Selection Scheme.
teTeX comes distributed with about a dozen standard fonts preloaded, which is enough to get you started. Also provided are the font metrics descriptions, in .tfm (TeX font metric) files. To generate the other fonts you will need, it is simply a matter of installing the Metafont sources. teTeX's dvi utilities will invoke Metafont automatically and generate the Computer Modern fonts that you need, on-the-fly.
Later on, we'll discuss how to get TeX to use Postscript fonts on your system, and how to help unify all of the various font schemes on your system. Not only will this provide you with a more consistent look on-screen and in print, it can save you wads of disk space, too.
There's a lot of software to assemble. In the meantime, you can start in "learning" TeX and LaTeX. Remember that teTeX and the font packages have been designed as two separate entities: teTeX is specific to Linux, but the CM and DC font distributions have been designed for many different platforms. While you are working on assembling the files, you can take a few breaks to locate some of the documentation that you will need.
There are user manuals available both commercially and via the internet. The two most useful -- and definitive -- commmercially available texts for beginners are:
"LaTeX: A Document Preparation System," by Leslie Lamport, 272 pp. If you're using LaTeX instead of plain TeX (highly recommended), this is the definitive reference.
If you must use plain TeX, "The TeXBook," by Donald Knuth, 483 pp., is the definitive reference. It is also necessary if you plan to do any serious class, package, or macro writing for LaTeX.
At your nearest CTAN site you can retrieve these documents for free:
"The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e," by Tobias Oetiker, Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna, and Elisabeth Schlegl, 69 pp. My URL to this wonderful document is:
ftp:wuarchive.wustl.edu:packages/TeX/info/lshort/*.
You can get a PostScript or .dvi version of the document ready for printing, or the native LaTeX document. There is also a version available in German: lkurz.*. Be sure to read the README file before assembling!
"A Gentle Introduction to TeX: A Manual for Self-Study," by Michael Doob, 91 pp. You can find this document at: ftp:wuarchive.wustl.edu:packages/TeX/info/gentle.tex Almost of necessity, this document covers less ground than its LaTeX counterpart, above. However, it will get you to the same place as the LaTeX manuals, if you still must use plain TeX for your documents.
There are, of course, other guides available to using TeX and LaTeX. They cover different aspects of these systems to varying degrees. The reference documents cited above, however, are the most comprehensive in scope that I have seen and the most suitable for someone who is approaching these systems for the first time.
You will note, however, that all of these references are hardware-independent. They won't tell you a thing about running teTeX specifically. That's where the documentation included with teTeX comes in, and what we'll spend most of the rest of this HOWTO on: getting output from this vast package.