LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.
LaTeX is based on Donald E. Knuth's TeX typesetting language or certain extensions. LaTeX was first developed in 1985 by Leslie Lamport, and is now being maintained and developed by the LaTeX3 Project.
LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content.
— latex-project