This manual describes plain $\TeX$ macros for typesetting books. Besides describing the macros, I have attempted to use as many of the available features as possible to produce the manual itself. The source code for the manual should thus serve as a useful example or template for a book.

In addition to the macros needed to format the text properly, I have included a number of features designed to make book production simpler, especially cross-referencing macros, index-generation macros, and contents-generation macros. Many features of the macros are aided by the freely available Eplain macro package by Karl Berry, who has contributed to the $\TeX$ community in ways too numerous to mention. It is impossible to express enough gratitude to Donald Knuth, author of $\TeX$, who made it all possible.

In order for some features to work, and for convenience, there is a companion shell script, makebook. To process a book, the usual process would then be something like

makebook manual
dvipdfmx -o manual.pdf manual

The script calls additional programs to aid with index and bibliography generation, for example, and will print a warning if some auxilliary information has changed, indicating that you should run makebook again to bring it up to date. You might, for example, see the output

–> table of contents has changed

There is also a companion perl script, tex_to_html.pl, that can be used to convert the $\TeX$ source for the book into a collection of html files; see chapter 7.