I still remember in the 1980’s how impressed we physicists were when we discovered Tex. The program was written by Donald Knuth. The macro package Tex is so good and complete that all new developments are mere front ends and user interfaces to Tex, of which Latex and AmsTex packages are the most popular. Newer distributions deal with newer hardware, new fonts and better font management, and pdf creation, but the fundament is still Tex.

Those scientists, like chemists and biologists, that use an occasional mathematical formula can do without Tex. All kinds of handy add-ins allow incorporating math formula’s in standard office documents. However, if your paper has many math formula’s the Tex-way is the only solution. In the rest I will limit myself to LaTex.

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