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muath · Post by **muath** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:13 pm

Please, what is the deferent between TeX, LaTeX, pdfLaTeX, and so on?

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Post by **Stefan Kottwitz** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:23 pm

TeX is the typesetting engine, other variants like LaTeX base on it. You could use TeX directly, but it's hard and looks more like programming. The output has DVI format.
LaTeX is a widely used extension of TeX. It introduces classes and packages and a lot of macros making using TeX easier. It uses TeX internally and the output has DVI format.
pdfTeX works like TeX but directly produces PDF output instead of DVI.
pdfLaTeX works like LaTeX but produces PDF instead of DVI.

Today many users work with pdfLaTeX.

Stefan

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