microtex

Microtex is a name used for several lightweight TeX-related software projects, rather than a single canonical product. In general, microtex denotes small-footprint TeX engines or utilities aimed at constrained environments where memory, storage, or CPU time are at a premium.

Historically, various independent projects have used the term microtex on different platforms, including early personal computers, workstations running Unix, and embedded systems. These implementations typically include core TeX processing with minimal dependencies and offer limited or no support for packages that modern TeX users rely on, such as LaTeX. Some microtex variants focus on portability and speed, delivering essential typesetting capabilities in compact binaries.

Compared with modern TeX distributions like TeX Live or MiKTeX, microtex projects are not designed to be comprehensive. They generally lack the breadth of fonts, macro packages, and modern input methods, and they may require manual font or encoding configurations. Because of their limited scope, they are rarely used in current mainstream publishing but may appear in retro-computing, embedded-system demonstrations, or historical documentation about TeX's evolution.

See also: TeX, TeX engine, LaTeX, TeX Live, MiKTeX.