Glossary Of Products, Terms, And Trademarks
A *nix system is a computer system based on an operating system similar to Unix. In practice, most software that can be compiled for any *nix system can be compiled for all *nix systems. Modern *nix systems include Sun Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux.
CVS is the version control system most favored by the open-source community. It has many advantages for collaboration, including its default non-locking checkout model.
InstallShield Express is a product of InstallShield, and allows one to quickly and intuitively build installations for the Windows® family of operating systems.
LaTeX is the single most user-hostile text processing program on the planet, but also perhaps the best at typesetting mathematics. It requires that one prepare a text file (or more likely, a large set of text files) to be processed in multiple passes of a LaTeX compiler and related utilities (utilities to collect index entries, for example). One might best describe LaTeX as a typesetting compiler. The ESRG book "A Practitioner's Guide ..." is prepared using LaTeX because of the heavy mathematical content.
LaTeX started with TeX and Donald Knuth's work on mathematical typesetting. This is an excerpt from a web page giving a partial history of LaTeX:
[1974]
Knuth stops submitting papers to the AMS because "the finished
product was just too painful for me to look at".[1977]
Knuth begins his research on typography.[1978]
Knuth delivers an AMS Gibbs Lecture entitled Mathematical
Typography [Bull. AMS, vol. 1 (March 1979), no. 2, pp. 337--372] to
the AMS membership at its annual meeting.[1979]
Digital Equipment Corporation and the American Mathematical Society
jointly publish Knuth's book TeX and METAFONT: New Directions in
Typesetting, which contains the text of Knuth's Gibbs Lecture.There are many distributions of LaTeX, all of which should and nearly always do perform identically. The most popular free distribution on the Internet is probably MikTeX. A very popular CD distribution with a very useful GUI is 4allTeX. If you want to get started right away and have a broadband connection, MikTeX is probably the way to go.
LaTeX runs on *nix systems as well as Windows® systems--in fact, some might argue that it runs better on *nix systems. A great many web pages on the Internet--especially technical web pages--are compiled using software that will generate documents and web pages from the same LaTeX source code.
A .tar.gz file is a compressed archive of files created on a *nix system, very similar in function to a .zip file (in fact, WinZip will process .tar.gz files, thus allowing one to open *nix archives on a Windows® system). .tar.gz files are traditionally created by the *nix tar utility.
Tcl, short for tool command language, is an open-source scripting language originally developed by Scriptics, which became Ajuba Solutions and was thereafter purchased by Interwoven.
Tk is a set of graphical extensions to Tcl (so that it can display windows, buttons, etc.).
The ESRG scripting tools are based on Tcl and Tk.
This
web page is maintained by David
T. Ashley.
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