from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Latex \La"tex\, n. [L.]
1. (Bot.) A milky or colored juice in certain plants in
cavities (called latex cells or latex tubes). It contains
the peculiar principles of the plants, whether aromatic,
bitter, or acid, and in many instances yields caoutchouc
upon coagulation. The lattex of the India rubber plant
produces the rubber of commerce on coagulation.
[1913 Webster +PJC]
2. (Chem.) Any aqueous emulsion of finely divided rubber or
plastic particles, especially such an emulsion used as a
base for paint; as, a latex paint.
[PJC]
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
LaTeX
<language, text, tool> (Lamport TeX) Leslie Lamport
<[email protected]>'s document preparation system built on
top of {TeX}. LaTeX was developed at {SRI International}'s
Computer Science Laboratory and was built to resemble
{Scribe}.
LaTeX adds commands to simplify typesetting and lets the user
concentrate on the structure of the text rather than on
formatting commands.
{BibTeX} is a LaTeX package for bibliographic citations.
Lamport's LaTeX book has an exemplary index listing every
symbol, concept and example in the book. The index in the,
now obsolete, first edition includes (on page 221) the
mysterious entry "Gilkerson, Ellen, 221". The second edition
(1994) has an entry for "infinite loop" instead.
["LaTeX, A Document Preparation System", Leslie Lamport, A-W
1986, ISBN 0-201-15790-X (first edition, now obsolete)].
(1997-11-17)