Actually I don't know what our papers were written on. I did the text and diagrams and somebody else dealt with formatting it all for submission. Ad astra per aspera
CTAN: What are TeX, LaTeX, and friends?
With a word processors your text is places while you type it, referred to as "what you see is what you get." In contrast, TeX is a formatter: it separates the steps of entering the material and placing it on the page. To see the difference, consider how a typical user of each system might start a new section. In a word processor a typical user might start that section by hitting <Enter> twice to get two lines of vertical space, typing "Section 1.2: New results", clicking to highlight that text, clicking to select a larger type size, clicking to select a new type style, and finally entering two more lines of vertical space. A typical user TeX user will type into a file the line "section{New results}". That is, a word processing user is formatting the text as they enter it, while the TeX user describes the meaning of the text and later TeX will format it. Beginners like word processing but when they graduate to complex jobs the appeal fades. Word processing a twenty page technical article is hard; for instance, keeping the vertical space between sections uniform is error-prone, and so is making sure that all of the bibliographic entries follow the required format. In particular, very few people have both the knowledge and the eye to correctly lay out equations -- people often say their equations "just don't look right." That is, as a user becomes more experienced and knowledgable the TeX approach of having the typesetting done by the program becomes the better choice. (Some word processors offer as advanced features TeX-like facilities for organizing input text, although few users take advantage of them.)
With a word processors your text is places while you type it, referred to as "what you see is what you get." In contrast, TeX is a formatter: it separates the steps of entering the material and placing it on the page.
To see the difference, consider how a typical user of each system might start a new section. In a word processor a typical user might start that section by hitting <Enter> twice to get two lines of vertical space, typing "Section 1.2: New results", clicking to highlight that text, clicking to select a larger type size, clicking to select a new type style, and finally entering two more lines of vertical space. A typical user TeX user will type into a file the line "section{New results}". That is, a word processing user is formatting the text as they enter it, while the TeX user describes the meaning of the text and later TeX will format it.
<Enter>
Section 1.2: New results
section{New results}
Beginners like word processing but when they graduate to complex jobs the appeal fades. Word processing a twenty page technical article is hard; for instance, keeping the vertical space between sections uniform is error-prone, and so is making sure that all of the bibliographic entries follow the required format. In particular, very few people have both the knowledge and the eye to correctly lay out equations -- people often say their equations "just don't look right." That is, as a user becomes more experienced and knowledgable the TeX approach of having the typesetting done by the program becomes the better choice. (Some word processors offer as advanced features TeX-like facilities for organizing input text, although few users take advantage of them.)
The input is plain text. TeX's source files are portable to any computing platform. They are compact; for instance, all of the files for my 450 page textbook and 125 page answer supplement fit easily on one floppy disk. And, they integrate with other tools such as search programs.
The output can be anything. As with inputting, TeX's outputting step is separate from its typesetting. The TeX engine's results can be converted to a printer language such as PostScript or to PDF or HTML, or, probably, to whatever will appear in the future. And, the typesetting -- line breaks, etc. -- will be the same no matter where your output appears. (Did you know that word processing output depends on the printer's fonts, so that if you email your work to someone with a different printer then for them the line and page breaks are likely to come out differently?)
As I understand it, changing one or two lines can change the appearance of a paper from AMS standard to pick your favorite glossy magazine standard. The blurker formerly known as ignorant bystander.
