[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX with Plain TeX

bibtexplain-tex

The manpage of bibtex says that it can be used with both LaTeX and TeX. However, I did not find any resource how to do it and also no TeX book of mine explains it. Can someone provide a minimalistic example?

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You can look at the btxmac.tex from Eplain (usually found in texmf-dist/tex/eplain). It includes an example of use with plain TeX.

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[Tex/LaTex] Transition from LaTeX to Plain TeX

Plain TeX does not provide the 'pre-built' structural concepts which LaTeX provides, such as TOC, sections and so on. Instead, it provides the basic typesetting mechanisms from which you can build these up. As mentioned in the comments, Knuth's The TeXbook is not only the definitive reference for TeX but also a guide to how to create a book using plain TeX, as the source is available for examination.

It's clear from The TeXbook that Knuth expected authors to create a suitable bundle of support macros for each document they create. He does this for The TeXbook in a file called manmac.tex which is then used with the plain format to provide the necessary layout and so on for the book.

Some parts of this process are easier than others. LaTeX works hard to make life easy for authors in some places, for example automatically constructing a table of contents from sections using the .toc file with a two-pass workflow, or providing the \label/\ref system via the .aux file. Setting these up by hand is non-trivial, and it is notable that Knuth does all of these things by hand in The TeXbook.

Depending on the exact requirements, creating a document in plain TeX may require quite a bit of TeX programming experience. The eplain set of macros are often recommended to allow plain TeX to use the LaTeX mechanisms for dealing with some driver-dependent work such as graphics.

[Tex/LaTex] Inserting an image in plain TeX

By far the easiest approach here is to use miniltx to allow you to use LaTeX's graphics package with plain TeX:

\input miniltx %
\input graphicx.sty %
\includegraphics{<filename>}
\bye

\input graphicx.tex %
\includegraphics{<filename>}
\bye

(See comments for the minor differences here.)

The only thing you will need to watch is that TeXworks is designed around a PDF-based workflow. Thus you will need to convert your .eps files to .pdf format using epstopdf and then use pdfTeX in TeXworks. (In LaTeX, there is now automatic conversion method from .eps to .pdf files, but this does not apply to plain TeX.)

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[Tex/LaTex] Transition from LaTeX to Plain TeX

[Tex/LaTex] Inserting an image in plain TeX

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