F a s T e X

Filip G. Machi
Jerrold E. Marsden
Wendy G. McKay


NOTICE

This FasTeX system of shortcuts contains a core of plain TeX commands common to all three variations of TeX, so plain TeX users may use any of the FasTeX shortcuts.

You are invited to try out the FasTeX shortcut system and to give us some feedback.

Note: In our TUGboat article ``Introduction to FasTEX: A System of Keyboard Shortcuts for the Fast Keying of TEX'', Volume 16, December, 1995, some of the URL information is incorrect because of changes that were needed after the article went to press. The correct links and a copy of the PDF version of the files are listed below. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update

The FasTeX shortcut system 1993-1997 was based on LaTeX.

In 1998, the shortcuts were revised to accommodate the commands for LaTeX2e.. The basic LaTeX commands remain unchanged. Commands for the preamble section, for example, had to be modified. The LaTeX2e shortcuts can be downloaded from
http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~marsden/about/fastex/home.

In 2010, Bernhard Enders implemented the FasTeX Shortcut system in the WinEdt Editor so PC users can now use the same shortcuts. See:
http://www.winedt.org/Macros/LaTeX/FasTeX.php

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BRIEF DESCRIPTION

FasTeX is a system of keyboard shortcuts for the fast keying of TeX (LaTeX) currently available for Macintosh and Unix computers. It replaces any keyboard shortcut by the equivalent TeX command or group of commands and will speed up your TeX inputting by a factor of 3, as well as providing many useful templates. It also helps to avoid the creation of special macro command abbreviations that make the TeX code hard to read and edit quickly by others who work on the same files. A set of files, which we shall refer to as the FasTeX Shortcut Files, contains the mapping information that expands keyboard shortcuts into the corresponding TeX commands.

MACINTOSH VERSION

The Macintosh version of FasTeX uses the shareware control panel TypeIt4Me and the FasTeX Shortcut Files. You will need some version of System 7 (or higher) to use FasTeX on a Mac. After collecting the files off the WWW sites, follow the Macintosh Installation Instructions .

UNIX VERSION

There is a version of the Macintosh FasTeX engine (TypeIt4Me) that runs on most flavors of UNIX. Called SCedit, the UNIX version uses the Expect program by Don Libes. Though not identical to the Mac version of TypeIt4Me, SCedit attempts to include all of the essential functionality of the Mac version, with a few consessions to differences in the operating systems. The FasTeX Unix Installation Instructions are included with the SCedit program.

DOCUMENTATION

An outline of the FasTeX system has been published as an article, Introduction to FasTeX: A System of Keyboard Shortcuts for the Fast Keying of TeX, in TUGboat Volume 16, Number 4, Proceedings of the Annual Tex Users Group Meeting 1995. [ Corrigendum ]
Local versions: [ article ]
The links referred to in both the article and the corrigendum are no longer correct. Try these instead:

TypeIt4Me http://homepage.mac.com/rettore/ty2/download.htm
http://www.ettoresoftware.com/products/typeit4me/ 		Mac OS 9 and X up to 10.4
Mac OS X 10.5 and higher
FasTeX for Mac/Unix http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~fastex/
http://wiki.cds.caltech.edu/fastex/home 		LaTeX (1995)
LaTeX2e (1998)
FasTeX for Windows http://www.winedt.org/Macros/LaTeX/FasTeX.php LaTeX2e (2010)


More complete documentation can be found in the FasTeX Documentation.

FasTeX Project
Control and Dynamical Systems 107-81
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
e-mail: fastex [at] cds [.] caltech [.] edu
[ Webpage first created in 1995 ]