On, he wrote a memo to himself describing the basic features of TeX. Knuth saw for the first time the output of a high-quality digital typesetting system, and became interested in digital typography. Disappointed, Knuth set out to design his own typesetting system. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior. When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a 'classic style' appreciated by Knuth. When the first paper volume of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published in 1968, it was typeset using hot metal typesetting on a Monotype machine. TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.

TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books with minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time (together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces). It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other macro packages. It has long since displaced Unix troff, the previously favored formatting system, in most Unix installations. TeX is widely used in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, political science, engineering, linguistics, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.

TeX ( / t ɛ x/, see below), stylized within the system as T eX, is a typesetting system which was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor Donald Knuth and first released in 1978.

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