AMSTEX(1)                   General Commands Manual                  AMSTEX(1)

NAME
       amstex - structured mathematical text formatting and typesetting

SYNOPSIS
       amstex [first-line]

DESCRIPTION
       The AmSTeX language is described in the book The Joy of TeX, available
       from https://ctan.org/pkg/joy-of-tex.

       AmSTeX is a TeX format (macro package), not a modification to the TeX
       source program, so all the capabilities described in tex(1) are
       present; see tex(1) for details of command-line parsing, etc.

       AmSTeX was developed by the American Mathematical Society, and used in
       their publishing program for many years. However, it is no longer
       developed or used by them. Instead, authors are encouraged to use
       LaTeX, likely with the amsmath package among others, which provides
       many useful mathematical features. The AmSTeX format is still provided
       for the sake of supporting existing documents.

       In the past, there were also formats named amslatex and lamstex which
       combined AmSTeX and LaTeX in various ways. These are no longer
       distributed; standard LaTeX is now what's recommended.

       The AmSTeX macros have extensive support for math typesetting. In
       general, like LaTeX, they encourage writers to think about the content
       of their documents, rather than the form. The ideal, not always
       realized, is to have no formatting commands (like "switch to italic" or
       "skip 2 picas") in the document at all; instead, everything is done by
       generic markup instructions: "emphasize", "start a section".

OPTIONS
       See tex(1).

ENVIRONMENT
       See tex(1).

BUGS
       See tex(1).

SEE ALSO
       latex(1), tex(1).

       Michael Spivak, The Joy of TeX, 2nd edition, American Mathematical
       Society, 1990, ISBN 0-8218-2997-1.
       https://ctan.org/pkg/joy-of-tex
       amsguide: Documentation for AmSTeX.
       amsmath package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/amsmath
       AmSTeX package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/amstex

Web2C 2026                      5 November 2025                      AMSTEX(1)