TeX and LaTeX (pronounced "tech" and "lay-tech") are high quality typesetting languages which do an especially fine job of printing mathematical documents.
Watch TeX do a perfect job with one of my class handouts, DFAs.tex, and its helping file epsf.def. Place both files into the same directory and cd into that directory. The command
tex DFAs.tex
produces a device independent image file DFAs.dvi. Then use the command
xdvi DFAs.dvi
to image and admire the .dvi file. The command
dvips -t Letter DFAs.dvi
sends equivalent postscript code to the default printer, and
dvips -t Letter -f DFAs.dvi > DFAs.ps gv DFAs.ps
creates a postscript file and then views it with Ghostview. The ps file can be printed by clicking on a button inside Ghostview. The -t Letter flag is necessary with dvips, since its default seems to be A4 paper size, as was the case with a2ps.
Notice that this TeX file has an included file epsf.def (although it was not needed in this case). This included file happens to be in the active directory alongside DFAs.tex, but such input files can go almost anywhere. Just use TeX input commands such as
\input /home/parrish/epsf.def
within the TeX document.
LaTeX is an alternative to TeX which is becoming something of a standard for preparing computer science reports and manuscripts.
Create a new directory called latex (or something), and put the file sample.tex into it. This sample file and the following sequence of instructions come from the O'Reilly book Running Linux
Now cd into the new directory and execute the command
latex sample
You should now have .aux, .dvi, and .log files in that directory
Execute the command
xdvi sample
and ignore lots of messages from metafont. Voil‡! You can create a postscript file with this command:
dvips -o sample.ps sample.dvi
The new file sample.ps should apppear in your directory. Print it like this:
lpr sample.ps
or use Ghostview to preview and print the postscript file as we did in the first example.