I’ve seen a few people here and there refer to LaTeX3 and expl3 interchangeably. While they’re very related, they are distinct from each other.

TeX is a great piece of software with a traditionally specific set of users: mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists in the field all at least know what TeX is simply because it is so pervasive in that domain. TeX is a fantastic tool for their job and mentors will commonly teach their students how to use the tool to get the job done. However, newcomers to TeX are rarely – if ever – given a good education on all the different players – what goes into getting them from introduction to installation to a finished product. I hope this article will answer some of these questions you never knew you had.

It’s been a long, confusing day as I’ve migrated some of my old content to Jekyll hosted by GitHub Pages served by DreamHost. In the hopes of saving some poor soul out there the same pain I’ve been through, I’m going to make this as simple and straightforward as I can. I drive stick with Jekyll on Mac OS X – I do not use GitHub’s page generator. If you want to use the page generator, you may still use this guide as a reference, but I’m sorry that it won’t line up perfectly.