TeX Definition

TeX is a popular typesetting system for authoring technical documents and, in particular, math expressions. There are many implementations of TeX such as LaTeX which is used in academia for typesetting books and papers. This website uses KaTeX for typesetting math expressions.

As opposed to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, TeX editors take in plain text as input and render the output. For example, the plain text below is passed to the typesetting system as input.

y=ax^2+bx+c

This input is then rendered to the following math expression.

Here are a couple of things that are helpful to know when using TeX.

1. Automatically sized braces

   The \left and \right commands can be used in combination with braces to automatically render the appropriately sized brace type around the expression. For example, the TeX expression below:

   \frac{d}{d x}\left( x^3 \right)

   Is rendered as:

   By prefixing the opening and closing parentheses with \left and \right, the parentheses are automatically rendered in the appropriate size to contain the expression between them.

2. Grouping expressions with curly braces

   Curly braces {} are used to group expressions. For example, let’s say we want to write raised to the power of . We can do this by writing the TeX expression below:

   e^{x+y}

   This is rendered as:

1. TeX (Wikipedia)
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
2. KaTeX
   https://katex.org/
3. KaTeX (Supported Functions)
   https://katex.org/docs/supported.html