[conspire] TeX better than LaTeX?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Dan Bikle (dan.bikle at gmail.com):

> Any of you Linux Mafia have an opinion on TeX better than LaTeX?

My recollection is that LaTeX is an optional document preparation software
system (and document markup language) that runs atop a TeX system.

On Unixes, a TeX system typically means TeX Live (http://www.tug.org/texlive/).
LaTeX furnishes a high-level language for it - a bunch of TeX macros and
a support program.  Obviously, it's a matter of taste whether to work
at high or low level.  No opinion here.

Anyway, in case you didn't know, if you have a LaTeX setup, you can try
both approaches and make up your own mind.

And, actually, you can also install LyX and work at a higher level
still:  a what-you-see-is-what-you-mean graphical front-end to LaTeX,
which in turn is a preprocessor for TeX.

Make sense?

> I read somewhere on the net about a year ago that Knuth prefers TeX
> over LaTeX.

Well, that figures.  He wrote TeX.  He didn't write LaTeX.