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TeX by Topic


TeX by Topic, A TeXnician's Reference,

by Victor Eijkhout

Addison-Wesley Publishing Company

Wokingham, England 1992

ISBN: 0-201-56882-9

List price US$28.95

pages 307+viii

Reissues


You can get a paper copy of TeX by Topic from lulu.com.


In 2014, the German TeX user group Dante republished TeX by Topic, including some corrections and figures that not made it into the original.

Tugboat writing

Between 1990 and 2010 I was a contributing editor (bbeeton was the main editor) of Tugboat, the TeX users group journal. Here are some of my favourite writings.

Public Domain


TeX by Topic went out of print in the late 1990s and I got the rights back. The pdf file was made available for ftp in 2000. There was a GNU repository for a while, but the source is now on Bitbucket.

The Computer Science of TeX and LaTeX


In 2004 I taught a computer science topics course at the University of Tennessee based on topics in TeX and LaTeX. Here are the lecture notes, printed or freely downloadable.

TeX activities

``TeX by Topic is a systematic reference manual designed as a companion to tutorial guides on the system. Packed with original, practical ideas, this book provides an invaluable information source that will give the TeX user the essential insight needed to solve TeX problems.'' [From the back cover]


``A beautifully written, concise and comprehensive discussion of TeX as a programming language [...] Eijkhout's book is not a loose collection of unconnected entries but a very systematic account of how TeX works as a programming language. Not the ideal first introduction, but an absolute must-read if you want to understand the deeper foundations of the TeX language. On many occasion when one of my macros didn't work, only by consulting Eijkhout's book was I able to find the source of my problem.'' [From a review by Martin Diedrich]


``Whenever I hit a wall in my TeX hacking, I try to find a clue in the book by Eijkhout [...]. This worked for me again.'' [Boris Veytsman, in Tugboat]