"Typesetting" is the rendering of letterforms
on visible media. Examples are the words (not
the graphics) on the printed pages of a book,
or the words on the display of your computer
screen.
Software for typesetting covers a broad range:
software appropriate for typesetting a phone book
will be of little help in preparing a magazine.
Also, it is frequently difficult to separate the
"software" from the "system," so this category will
include proprietary typesetting systems.
One can't set type without fonts, so we will
address fonts here. We will also provide links
to related technologies and information
such as digital type design and research
on human perception of type.
Batch typographic systems are usually for
specialized purposes: we use them when we have
particular needs that exceed the capabilities
of the interactive systems (which are usually
easier to use and cheaper to acquire).
Examples are systems that must process very high
volumes of type, or provide a high degree of control
of the output, or allow conditional decisions
in the output based on the content of the data.
TeX is a typesetting system by Donald Knuth which allows one to create sophisticated documents containing mathematics. It supports the creation of complex macros to handle any common tasks.
Publications of interest to TeX users or developers. (Items created with TeX should be submitted to their respective subject categories.)