Greek, Cyber-virgins, in LaTeX

For some reason, recently I've been reading a lot of math and writing a lot of LaTeX. I was getting lost in the symbols so I wrote up a chart of the Greek alphabet in LaTeX math mode, in pretty black, white and grey. The source is annotated with instructions for Web 2.0 programmers to replace the grey with cornflower blue.

While putting this together I came across the book TeX by Topic, a TeXnician's Reference, by Victor Eijkhout. The original book, published in 1992, has been out of print for a few years, but it is avaliable from the author's web site as a 289pp PDF. Chapter 1 covers the low-level input processor and expansion, and the subsequent 269 pages go below that, into the nasty implementation details of TeX:

"The four levels [of input processing] (corresponding roughly to the 'eyes', 'mouth', 'stomach' and 'bowels' respectively in Knuth's original terminology ..."

Thanks to the quick search capabilities of my PDF reader I was able to find the details I needed about macro expansion within the few minutes of sanity that this book affords the casual reader. If you are planning to start a neo-tribalistic techno-cult, I highly recommend this book as a means of torturing hapless cyber-virgins during their last few hours before sacrifice.

And keep it real: Respect Knuth's original terminology.