Formatting Information

TEX Live installs on all modern desktop, laptop, and server platforms. You can download a copy of the TEX Live distribution from the TUG web site at https://tug.org/texlive, or ask your local TEX user group or another TUG member to burn a DVD for you. All the individual platform distributions are also available from CTAN in https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/.

This book assumes you are using one of the following distributions of TEX (LATEX is included with all distributions of TEX).

TEX Live

for all Unix & GNU/Linux systems including Apple Macintosh OS X, and for Microsoft Windows;

TEX Live is also available specially packaged for installation on Linux systems through the Linux repositories for each system.

MiKTEX

for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh OS X, and some GNU/Linux systems, by Christian Schenk. The Mac version includes the TEXStudio editor;

MacTEX

for Apple Macintosh OS X. MacTEX includes the TEXshop editor.

The TEX Live distribution is issued annually by TUG in conjunction with many of the local TEX user groups around the world (see http://www.tug.org/lugs.html for addresses), and edited by Akira Kakuto, Hironobu Yamashita, Hironori Kitagawa, Karl Berry, Luigi Scarso, Mojca Miklavec, Norbert Preining, Reinhard Kotucha, Siep Kroonenberg, Takuji Tanaka, and many others. Other systems are due to Richard Koch (MacTEX) and Christian Schenk (MiKTEX). CTAN is a volunteer service which we owe to the hard work of Erik Braun, Ina Dau, Manfred Lotz, Gerd Neugebauer, and Petra Rübe-Pugliese (details at https://ctan.org/credits).

These people give an enormous amount of their personal time and energy to building and distributing these systems, and they deserve the thanks and support of the user community for all they do. A special debt is owed to the dedication of the late Sebastian Rahtz, one of the prime movers in TUG, the TEX Collection DVD, and the support of TEX and LATEX for many decades.

Commercial implementations

There was for many years also a selection of commercial distributions you could buy, as described in § 5 above, and while they are no longer available for sale, many are still in use: they all processed LATEX identically, but there were some differences in size, speed, packaging, installation, support, and extra software provided.

LATEX in the cloud

If you cannot install TEX at all (for example, your computer is corporate issue and locked down to prevent software being installed), there are several interactive online systems available such as Overleaf (formerly known as ShareLATEX) and Papeeria. These systems are browser-based, and have an edit window and a PDF window, just like an installed system, and they all run LATEX exactly as if it was installed on your desktop. A plus point is that they provide for multi-author collaboration. The drawback is that you have to upload any of your own files (pictures, graphs, diagrams, drawings, or personal fonts).