EPLAIN(1)

💖 EPLAIN(1) — General Commands Manual 💖

okay bestie, so you know how there's the manual page for this thing called eplain? It's filed under section 1, in the General Commands Manual, and it is genuinely so cute. Sit down, grab a boba, we're doing this. 🧋

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✨ NAME ✨

eplain — expanded plain TeX. that's it, that's the name, it's giving "we took plain TeX and we EXPANDED it", no cap. 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

eplain [ first-line ]

so you just run eplain and optionally hand it a first-line argument. simple as that, periodt.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so eplain is literally an extension of plain TeX, and it was originally described in the book TeX for nroff for the Impatient (iykyk 📚).

the way that it works is it takes plain TeX and adds a whole bunch of features to it — among others, which is a fancy way of saying "this list is not even complete, there's more, don't @ me" — and here's the whole list, bestie, every single one:

• left-justified displays
• double-column output
• tables of contents
• \hrule and \vrule with a different default than 0.4pt (yes, the default is different, we do not use 0.4pt around here 💀)
• time of day
• verbatim file listing
• generalized footnotes
• blank and black boxes
• citations using BibTeX

like, look at that list. left-justified displays? double columns? a table of contents?? generalized FOOTNOTES?? main character energy fr fr. 👑

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• eplain/doc/eplain.texi — the TeXable documentation of the etex macros, all done up in texinfo format. so organized, we love to see it. ✨
• eplain.info* — online GNU Emacs info(1) files, and these babies were produced from eplain.texi. 🫶

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

go look at these, they're iconic:

• https://tug.org/eplain/
• https://ctan.org/pkg/graphics-pln
• https://ctan.org/pkg/optex

and also these:

• texinfo(5), tex(1)
• Karl Berry, eplain, TUGboat 11(4), 571--572, 1990, https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-4/tb30resources.pdf
• Paul W. Abrahams with Karl Berry and Kathryn A. Hargreaves, TeX for nroff for the Impatient, https://ctan.org/pkg/impatient

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okay so real talk — that's the whole page, every flag, every file, every reference, nothing skipped, I would never do you like that. 💖

and that's a wrap!! this was Eplain 3.14, dated 16 April 2024, and honestly? iconic of it. slay, go typeset something pretty bestie 🌈🌸💅