TeX Frequently Asked Questions - Introduction

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# Introduction

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 (`bobby@hot.caltech.edu`).

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.

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