''Computers and Typesetting'' is a 5-volume set of books by

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

published in 1986 describing the

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

and Metafont systems for

digital typography Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online c ...

. Knuth's computers and typesetting project was the result of his frustration with the lack of decent software for the typesetting of mathematical and technical documents. The results of this project include TeX for typesetting, Metafont for

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

construction and the

Computer Modern Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely u ...

typefaces that are the default fonts used by TeX. In the series of five books Knuth not only describes the TeX and Metafont languages (volumes A and C), he also describes and documents the source code (in the WEB programming language) of the TeX and Metafont interpreters (volumes B and D), and the source code for the

fonts used by TeX (volume E). The book set stands as a tour de force demonstration of

literate programming Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced in 1984 by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given as an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed (embedded) with snippets of macros and t ...

. The books themselves were typeset in the

Roman typeface using TeX; thus, in Knuth's words, they "belong to the class of sets of books that describe precisely their own appearance."

Volumes

The five volumes are published by Addison-Wesley. #Volume A: The TeXbook. ''Describes the TeX typesetting language''. It is by far the most common and available of the set, as the TeX interpreter is widely used for typesetting. It is available in softcover (blue spiral-bound with a built-in flap for a bookmark) and hardcover #Volume B: TeX: The program. ''A documented listing of the source code of the TeX interpreter'' The 1986 edition in hardcover is #Volume C: The METAFONTbook. ''Describes the METAFONT font description language.'' Hardcover , softcover . #Volume D: Metafont: The program. ''A documented listing of the source code of the Metafont interpreter.'' Hardcover , paperback #Volume E: Computer Modern Typefaces. ''A character-by-character listing (in the Metafont language) of the source code for the

typefaces (cmr, cmbx, cmti, etc.) used by TeX.'' Hardcover: , Softcover: The set is also available as a hardcover boxed set with the latest editions as of the year 2000. A jubilee edition of the Volumes A to D was published by Addison-Wesley in February 2021 incorporating all the changes made during the TeX tune-up of 2021. (Volume E remained unchanged from the 2017 edition.)

References

External links

*http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html {{Donald Knuth navbox 1986 non-fiction books Computer books TeX Typesetting software Handbooks and manuals Books by Donald Knuth American non-fiction books