According to Wikipedia “Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical type (or sort) in mechanical systems or glyphs in digital systems representing characters (letters and other symbols).”
Computer typesetting systems let you generate high quality documentation including books with minimal effort.
TeX was one of the earliest typesetting systems, first released in 1978. Many of its design decisions have stood the test of time, and TeX is still an extremely well-used typesetting system more than forty years after its inception. In particular, it’s renowned for its means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
LaTeX is a document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. It’s a generalised set of macros to help users do many things. Most people don’t want to have to program TeX, especially to set up things like sections, title pages, bibliographies and so on. LaTeX provides all of that: these are the ‘macros’ it offers.
There are quite a few good typesetting systems available for Linux besides TeX. Here’s our roundup of ones which are most useful. Only free and open source software is included.
We haven’t prepared a ratings chart for this roundup.
Let’s explore the typesetting systems. They are listed in alphabetical order.
| Typesetting Systems | |
|---|---|
| groff | Reimplementation and extension of the typesetter from AT&T Unix |
| Lout | Reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX |
| SILE | Has features inspired by TeX and InDesign, but seeks to be more flexible |
| Texinfo | Typesetting syntax used for generating documentation |
| TeXmacs | Has an independent typesetting engine rather than using TeX |
| typst | Markup-based typesetting system for the sciences |
| We cover LaTeX separately. Here's our roundup of the best LaTex Tools | |
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