We have talked in previous posts about some of the most important and successful markup languages that we can find nowadays such as, for instance, HTML, XML or XHTML. However, in today’s post I am briefly going to mention and introduce two markup languages – LaTeX and TEI – that could be new to some of you in spite of their great utility in some specific fields of knowledge.
LaTeX
The first markup language that we are going to study today is LaTeX, which was created in 1984 by Leslie Lamport in order to make easier the use of Donald Knuth’s TeX. This markup language is widely accepted among mathematicians, scientists, engineers, philosophers, economists and other scholars due to its ability to write academic and technical books containing mathematic signs and formulae.
In addition, I would like to introduce you TEI. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an association of American and European academic institutions that has developed a standard for representation of texts in digital form. The TEI has set some guidelines specifying encoding methods for machine-readable texts in the areas of humanities and social sciences.
The TEI has collaborated with important institutions such as, for example, the Brown University or Oxford; and, as a result, the TEI has taken extremelly interesting projects including the Canterbury Tales Project, the Oxford Text Archive, the Perseus Project or the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, just to mention some of them.
Summing up, although some markup languages are not as popular as others, we have discovered that all of them can be truly successful when we are dealing with a very particular field of knowledge and its special needs for encoding texts. I hope that you have found this entry about LaTeX and TEI helpful and interesting. To conclude, as always, I encourage you to keep on investigating this matter of markup languages (BibTeX… ) because you will not regret.
References:
- LaTeX. (2009, November 28). In LaTeX Project site. Retrieved: 19:38, November 28, 2009, from
http://www.latex-project.org/ - Drakos,N. (1995, November 17). Manual de LaTeX by the Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. Retrieved: 19:10, November 28, 2009, from
http://www.fceia.unr.edu.ar/lcc/cdrom/Instalaciones/LaTex/latex.html - Text Proccessing using LaTeX. (2009, November). In Department of Engineering of Cambridge University. Retreieved: 19:14, November 28, 2009, from
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/ - LaTeX. (2009, November 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 18:21, November 28, 2009, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LaTeX&oldid=340092178 - TEI: Text Encoding Initiative. (2009). In Text Encoding Initiative site. Retrieved: 18:57, November 28, 2009, from
http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml - Text Encoding Initiative. (2009, November 26). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 18:42, November 28, 2009, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_Encoding_Initiative&oldid=336490551 - TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding. (2005, June 27). In Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Retrieved: 18:53, November 28, 2009, from
http://etext.virginia.edu/standards/tei/teip4/
(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)
